Edit metric embedding limits audit

Family 099: The sharp exponential scale of edit-distance distortion. First review, 9 October 2026 Australia/Brisbane.

Problem and potential new use

Document retrieval teams can distinguish fast surrogate-distance indexing from accurate worst-case edit-distance preservation.

Applicability and commercial boundary

The lower distortion grows with word length; it does not prohibit useful heuristic embeddings on restricted corpora, and it does not supply an alignment.

Initial business decision

Prototype diagnostic. Commercial demand and profitability remain hypotheses.

Next verification action

Combine explicit finite string fixtures with the approximate-edit dossier and measure surrogate-distance failures.

Evidence scope

The catalog statement was individually reviewed. Main-paper and selected formal-scope passages were additionally inspected for families 090, 093, 094, 097, 325, 328 and 332; this record does not claim a full proof audit or independent Lean verification. Source revision fd4aeeb2ee4fc729c18d98444fed42fd0529eeeb. See source metadata.