Measurement-Access Risk Frontiers for Autonomous Scientific Control

Abstract

Rapidly scaling autonomous science is limited not only by algorithms, compute or data volume, but by which physical records a platform exposes before action. We formulate physically accessible decision-making (PADM) and a measurement-access risk frontier: the Bayes-optimal target risk minimized over records realizable under cost, bandwidth, latency, disturbance, memory and actuation constraints. The frontier gives a no-free-autonomy limit: automation cannot collapse decision uncertainty by computation alone; an optimal controller cannot remove target components absent from its record, and closing that gap requires expanded access, auditing, tolerated disturbance, slower operation or restricted deployment. In monitored feedback, displacement-only control remains exposed to a hidden switching force, whereas a finite-bandwidth cue recovers part of the missing projection before action. A chemistry-aware candidate-ranking audit with a 1000-target stress panel, Gaussian sensing, hidden-regime decisions and cost-aware/thermodynamic channel selection provide reproducible checks. PADM identifies target-specific audit value and residual oracle gaps before deployment.