H.7.6 Speculation

Speculation tests future states before every preceding candidate is known to pass.

• Identify each state by its base plus an ordered set of candidate changes and attach every result to that exact state.
• Invalidate dependent states when an earlier candidate changes or fails; reuse only equivalent work and policy.
• Distinguish direct candidate, inherited, infrastructure, and inconclusive failure before retry or reorder.
• Bound depth, expensive change classes, concurrency, scheduler pressure, and storage.
• Adopt speculation only after serialization is a measured bottleneck worth the additional state machine.