clay-borg/evidence/CB-EV-0030-h1-measured.md

# CB-EV-0030 — H1 measured

CB-WP-0038. Tier L (structural L; **chaos d8 = 8 → override, redraw = L**
— the override changed nothing). **Declaration 10 of chaos window 3, and
the window's first 8.** Closed 2026-08-08.

> **This evidence has not had its tier-L adversarial review** (InnerLoop
> Step 2). **It may not go to `ground-game` until it has.** It is a
> measurement of another repo's design hypothesis, which is precisely the
> case the review exists for.

**Delivered:** variant selection in the kernel, H1-A and H1-B implemented
from `rules_delta.yaml`, ground-game's `unchanged:` list asserted rather
than trusted, and the ATTACK panel re-run for both rule sets.

---

## 1. The result, against their own criteria

`ground-game`'s success criteria (design note §3.2), answered one by one.
**Three of four fail.**

| # | criterion | verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DARVO arm rate non-trivial, "not 0/500" | **fails** — still **0** under greedy at every seat count |
| 2 | ATTACK selection rises for some subpopulation | **fails** — greedy still attacks **0** times; and for the rank-75 policy ATTACK *fell*, 604 → 180 at 2p |
| 3 | group success does not collapse | **fails hardest** — greedy's wins go **165 → 0** (3p), **190 → 0** (4p), **200 → 0** (6p) |
| 4 | Bond/GROUND stay better than DARVO | holds, but **vacuously**: DARVO never fires |

SHARED GROUND, greedy column, 200 games per cell:

| seats | baseline won | H1 won |
|---|---:|---:|
| 2p | 132 | **68** |
| 3p | 165 | **0** |
| 4p | 190 | **0** |
| 6p | 200 | **0** |

## 2. Why — and the mechanism is not the one H1 assumed

H1-A was meant to raise Stress toward the DARVO arm at 5. **It does not
get there under competent play.** One 3-player game, seed 1:

| | rounds | final Stress | Problems unclaimed | DARVO armed | outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| baseline | 5 | 0, 1, 2 | 0 | 0 | 9 of 7 — **success** |
| H1 | 5 | 3, 3, 3 | 2 | 0 | 4 of 7 — **failure** |

**Greedy spends its actions on Stress instead of Problems.** The pressure
is answered by regulating, so Stress plateaus around 3 — below the gate at
4 and well below the arm at 5 — while two Problems go unclaimed and the
total lands under the threshold.

**So H1-A behaves as a solve-rate tax, not as DARVO pressure.** And since
Stress never reaches 4, **H1-B never fires at all under competent play**:
the self-soothe is unreachable by the policy it was designed to tempt.

**The seat-count pattern is the tell.** At 2p — three Problems, so a table
can clear the board — H1 *helps* in SHARED (132 → 68 is a fall, but 2p is
the only band that still wins at all). At 3p and above the board is bigger
than the pressure allows a table to clear, and success goes to zero. The
tax scales with the number of Problems; the intended effect does not.

## 3. The harness defect caught before the claim

The first run showed `won`, `atk` and `darvo` **all exactly 0** at 3+
seats. That is the signature of games being *discarded*, not lost.

`sweep` had `let Ok(g) = play(st, &mut ps) else { continue };` and **never
reported its game count**, so a run in which nothing played and a run in
which nothing won were the same output.

> **Reporting "H1 makes the game unwinnable" when the truth might have
> been "our harness threw every H1 game away" would have been the
> ADR-0018 family — aimed, this time, at another repository's design
> decision.**

Instrumented: setup failures counted, `play` errors captured and printed,
`games != 200` reported. **All 200 ran in every cell.** The zeros are
real, and now they are known to be real.

## 4. What this evidence does not say

- **It does not say H1 is a bad idea.** It says these two deltas, at these
  magnitudes, measured by this panel, do not do what §3.2 asks. Their §6
  already has the branch for it: *"H1 measured | DARVO still ~0 | add Idea
  2 last-place stress (semi only) as H2"*.
- **The panel is greedy-family throughout** — greedy, and greedy with
  ATTACK reranked to 75 and 95. Plural, per RetrospectiveAnalysis §4.1,
  but not diverse. A policy that *manages Stress badly* would reach 5 and
  arm DARVO, and none of these do. **That is the obvious next measurement
  and it has not been run.**
- **No felt-play.** GROUND-WP-0003 T01–T05 runs human tables separately,
  and 200-game aggregates cannot say what a table feels like.

## 5. A tuning direction, offered as a question and not a finding

If the aim is Stress reaching 5 sometimes, the tax must outrun regulation.
Candidates, none measured: pressure scaling with the *number* of unclaimed
Problems rather than a flat +1; applying it only above a Round threshold;
or lowering the DARVO arm below 5. **Each is a rules change and therefore
ground-game's to make, not ours to propose as a fix.**

## 6. Cost

`make cost`, not inlined. One vendored catalog and one experiment package;
no new dependency.

## Open after this pass

- **The tier-L adversarial review**, before any of this travels.
- **A policy that regulates badly**, which is the measurement §4 names.
- **H1-B has never been observed firing** in a real game — only in a unit
  test. A delta that competent play cannot reach is untested where it
  matters.