Encoding, computation, and design at the frontier of information theory, computational physics, and engineered minimalism. Published in public repositories, from the south end of the map.
Zer0pa is a research and engineering laboratory organised as a portfolio of independent products. Each product is its own invention, its own codec or artefact, its own commercial story. The portfolio is held together by a shared philosophy, not a shared implementation.
In physics, the zero point is the ground state — what is always there, what cannot be removed. Zero point encoding applies the same posture to information: find the minimal, fundamental representation for a signal or structure in its native domain, and ship from that frontier. The ground state of a domain is where foundational work actually happens. That is where we work.
The portfolio spans three active categories and one emerging.
Per-modality geometric encoding. Each product addresses a specific signal or structural domain under bounded scope, with honest negatives and real positives. Shipped products include touch, mental imagery, symbolic music, sparse-stroke image, and structural diagram encoding. Research-in-progress includes smell and several others — XR, FT, Geo, Video, IoT, Robotics, Ink, Mocap, Neuro, Prosody, Bio, Cipher. Products graduate from research to shipped when they earn it.
Taste is published as an evidenced negative — a formally tested modality where the current lane object does not sustain honest geometric structure. Negatives are first-class results.
A deterministic mathematical artefact whose output is invariant across the tested substrate axes of a commodity mobile SoC, attested by a NIST-KAT trust chain. Gate surface identified by canonical SHA; dynamics-layer basin distribution holds across four independent substrate conditions. The category this opens is determinism-as-a-service for mobile computation — a property of the device, not a privilege of the datacenter.
Design-physics engineering at the ship scale. Current work is the Zero Class Vessel Hull 20098 concept — a hydrogen-electric commercial freighter — and the ZeroShip platform that holds ship-design systems to scientific standards. Public surfaces publish architecture, authority, and honest boundaries without releasing private code, CAD, or partner data.
Machine learning on ancient scripts including cuneiform and Indus Valley. Currently incubated within ZPE-Cipher; will graduate to its own portfolio as the work matures. Scripts that fell silent for millennia learning, slowly, to travel again.
Always-in-beta is our commercial posture, not a hedge. Products ship when they have utility. They improve continuously because scientific and engineering breakthroughs do not arrive on a schedule. What you install today works. What you install next month may be materially better.
Honest scope. Every product names what it does, what it doesn't, and where the boundary sits. We claim novelty where we have it. We call standard techniques standard.
Per-product novelty. One portfolio-wide license (Zer0pa Source-Available License) with per-product novelty schedules. Protection is honest — enumerated where the invention is, silent where it isn't.
Negatives are results. When a modality or approach fails under rigorous falsification, we publish that as a first-class artefact, not a setback. A field that stops paying for the same failed experiment twice is a field that gets to move faster.
Each active product is its own repository — self-contained, with its own README, CI, proof artefacts, and Verdict. The full live index follows; see each repo's README for headline metrics, comp benchmarks where applicable, and current state.
- ZPE-Bio — Deterministic ECG codec; Python + Rust core; 100% integrity across MIT-BIH, NSTDB, EDB, PTB-XL
- ZPE-Diagram — Deterministic structural-with-style diagram codec; SVG line-graph transport
- ZPE-FT — Deterministic financial time-series codec; pattern search; parquet+zstd+DuckDB comparator
- ZPE-Geo — Deterministic geospatial trajectory codec; H3 indexing; Douglas-Peucker comparator
- ZPE-Image — Deterministic sparse-stroke image codec; geometry-layer encoding for glyphs and skeletons
- ZPE-Ink — Deterministic digital-ink codec (
.zpink); CRC-framed lossless stroke roundtrip - ZPE-IoT — Deterministic IoT sensor codec; 1D time-series; Rust core + PyO3 bindings; zstd/lz4/zlib/gorilla comparators
- ZPE-Mental — Deterministic endogenous visual form codec; Klüver taxonomy (tunnel, spiral, lattice, cobweb)
- ZPE-Mocap — Deterministic motion capture codec; CMU corpus; ACL comparator
- ZPE-Music — Deterministic symbolic-score codec; MusicXML roundtrip with note-local expression refinement
- ZPE-Neuro — Deterministic neural signal codec; extracellular spike events; DANDI-anchored
- ZPE-Prosody — Deterministic speech prosody codec; F0 / energy / duration / voiced-mask contour bundles
- ZPE-Robotics — Deterministic motion kernel; Wire-V1 transport; replay + search-without-decode; LeRobot benchmark
- ZPE-Smell — Deterministic smell codec; surrogate receptor-response encoding (research-in-progress)
- ZPE-Taste — Bounded-negative evidence record (the lane object did not sustain honest geometric structure on the committed evaluation)
- ZPE-Touch — Deterministic touch stream codec; contact + thermal + vibrotactile + proprioceptive branch isolation
- ZPE-XR — Deterministic XR hand-stream codec; pose compression; ContactPose benchmark
Cipher and Video are in private development; Rosetta is currently incubated within Cipher and will graduate when the work matures.
- DM3 — Deterministic mathematical artefact; substrate-invariance across mobile SoC tested axes; NIST-KAT trust chain
- ZeroShip — Ship-first engineering platform; design-physics at ship scale
- Zero-Class-Vessel-Hull-20098 — Hydrogen-electric commercial freighter concept (Hull 20098)
- .github — Organization profile and community health files
- workflows — Reusable GitHub Actions workflows (release pipelines, validation surfaces)
Zer0pa is a private South African deep-tech company operating as a laboratory. We publish because verifiable science in public repositories is the funding model we believe in — and because the instruments required to do foundational work no longer respect the old maps.