# 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](source.json).