a compression can be accepted when each item's nearest neighbors survive while the memory's global structure quietly breaks: at 96 bytes per passage, rescored binary codes scored a local fidelity of 0.97 yet moved 10.1% of passages to another theme, while PCA with 8-bit codes at a local fidelity of 0.77 moved only 1.7%. The paper evaluates both ends — local at 10 neighbors, global at 30–50% of the memory — which is the check to steal before trusting any compressed agent memory.