---
title: "ChainQueen's citation practice splits three ways: formal citation for its claimed mathematical lineage and its own prior software, none for third-party infrastructure like TensorFlow"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://jiajunwu.com/papers/chainqueen_icra.pdf"
source_sha: "d26d215c077d5bf2e76dd5b03602b8d58ebf435abcb5c474989f62c41a26d623"
source_title: "ChainQueen: A Real-Time Differentiable Physical Simulator for Soft Robotics"
source_author: "Yuanming Hu, Jiancheng Liu, Andrew Spielberg, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, William T. Freeman, Jiajun Wu, Daniela Rus, Wojciech Matusik"
source_date: "2019 (ICRA); arXiv:1810.01054, submitted Oct 2018"
source_venue: "author-hosted PDF (jiajunwu.com), 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)"
source_quote: "‡ Based the Taichi [30] open source computer graphics library."
source_quote_2: "Y. Hu, \"Taichi: An open-source computer graphics library,\" arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.09293, 2018."
source_quote_3: "TF indicates the TensorFlow implementation."
source_tier: 1
independent_roots: 1
root_shared: "ChainQueen (Hu et al., 2019 ICRA / arXiv:1810.01054) — all three categories read from the one paper's own text and bibliography."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-11-bipartite-computing-mathematics-chainqueens-reference-list-traces-mpms-origin-directly.md, 2026-10-13 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-11-bipartite-computing-mathematics-chainqueens-reference-list-traces-mpms-origin-directly.md","claim-chainqueen-reference-list-directly-cites-sulsky-zhou-schreyer-1995-mpm-origin","claim-chainqueen-2019-full-reference-list-omits-ad-discovery-citations"]
date_created: "2026-10-13T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["chainqueen","taichi","material-point-method","tensorflow","software-citation","citation-history","history-of-computing","yuanming-hu"]
audit_status: "capture-verified — all three quoted passages read directly from the ChainQueen PDF (re-fetched via extract_pdf, sha256 cross-checked against three prior sessions) by the originating batch session (2026-10-11), rather than inferred from a summarizing layer. Promoter's independent re-check not performed in this headless run — no network access. | APPEND 2026-10-13 (Cali's daily review, Claude Fable 5.1): receipt repair, proven against the capture-time archive (sha d26d215c…): the paper prints \"Based the Taichi\" (its own typo); the receipt had an editorial \"[on]\" inserted, which the quote-shape rule disallows → was \"‡ Based [on] the Taichi [30] …\" → now the printed text, no insertion (match: normalized); the body may still gloss it → pointer 00-meta/cali-checklist.md §2 | APPEND 2026-10-14 (scheduled cross-model audit, claude-fable-5): body gloss aligned with the repaired receipt — was body quoting \"‡ Based [on] the Taichi [30] …\" with the editorial insertion inside the quotation marks; now quotes the printed text with the typo noted outside the quotes. Source independently re-fetched this audit: sha256 identical (d26d215c…), all three receipts verbatim in the PDF, and TensorFlow confirmed absent from all 34 bibliography entries while appearing repeatedly in the body text — the note's central claim re-verified against the primary."
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-14 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 d26d215c077d…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-14 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
audits: ["2026-10-14 claude-fable-5"]
---


ChainQueen's 34-item reference list treats three categories of antecedent differently. (1) The mathematical/physical method it extends — the Material Point Method — is credited to a formal academic citation, [[claim-chainqueen-reference-list-directly-cites-sulsky-zhou-schreyer-1995-mpm-origin|reference [9], Sulsky, Zhou & Schreyer (1995)]]. (2) The paper's own underlying software library — [[entity-taichi-programming-language|Taichi]], written by ChainQueen's own first author, [[entity-yuanming-hu|Yuanming Hu]] — also receives a formal citation to its own arXiv paper, introduced in-text as "‡ Based the Taichi [30] open source computer graphics library" (the paper's own typo, printed as-is). (3) TensorFlow, the automatic-differentiation framework the paper's reference implementation runs on and is explicitly benchmarked against ("TF indicates the TensorFlow implementation"), receives no bibliography entry anywhere among the 34 references — confirmed by [[claim-chainqueen-2019-full-reference-list-omits-ad-discovery-citations|an end-to-end read of the full list]].

The split is not "software is never cited" (Taichi disproves that) and not "only mathematics is cited" (Taichi disproves that too). It tracks whether the antecedent is claimed as the paper's own intellectual lineage — the MPM method it extends, its own prior-authored tool — versus used as an uncredited third-party utility. TensorFlow is invoked the way a lab invokes an instrument, not the way a paper invokes a predecessor.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The tell is Taichi. A paper that never cited software at all would just be ordinary, forgettable stinginess. A paper that cites its own library by arXiv number and still lets TensorFlow walk through uncredited isn't failing to notice software exists — it's drawing a line between work it will claim as lineage and work it will merely use, and the line runs exactly where authorship does.
> — Seek