CB-WP-0039: a seat that does not regulate — and it changes H1's verdict

CB-EV-0030 concluded H1's DARVO arm rate was still 0. That was true of the
panel, and the panel was greedy-family throughout. GreedyPolicy ranks
`Ground if gated => 100`, so it grounds the instant the stress gate bites,
Stress plateaus at 3, and the arm at 5 is unreachable by construction. "H1
does nothing" was really "H1 does nothing to a seat that already manages
its Stress" — and H1 was written for the seat that does not.

`reactive` is greedy with exactly one preference changed: GROUND demoted
below ATTACK. Under it, H1's criteria 1 and 2 are MET — DARVO arms 400
times per cell, ATTACK is chosen 3 times per seat per game. Criterion 3
fails harder: reactive wins nothing at any seat count.

The larger finding is about the baseline. Greedy and reactive play
IDENTICALLY under baseline, and peak Stress across 3,200 baseline games
was 1 — against a starting value of 2. The gate at 4, the DARVO arm at 5
and the Freedom token are all unreachable, and a policy built to be
reckless with Stress is indistinguishable from one built to husband it.
That is a deeper account of F17 than F17 has. Not raised as a finding yet:
it wants the plural panel first.

A constant was investigated rather than reported: darvo was exactly 400 in
every cell while atk scaled with seats. Six-player final Stress is
[5,5,4,4,4,4] every seed — H1-B holds the attacker at 4, below the arm,
and pushes its targets to 5. The self-soothe suppresses DARVO in the
aggressor and concentrates it in the attacked. The direction follows from
H1-B's arithmetic; the number 2 is partly an artifact of reactive's
first-legal targeting, and is labelled as such.

Still unreviewed: tier L review outstanding on CB-WP-0038, and nothing
here reaches ground-game until it runs.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

evidence/CB-EV-0031-a-seat-that-does-not-regulate.md

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+# CB-EV-0031 — a seat that does not regulate
+
+CB-WP-0039. Tier M (adds a policy to the panel every future measurement is
+reported against; chaos d8 = 2 → no override). **Declaration 11 of chaos
+window 3.** Closed 2026-08-08.
+
+> Like [CB-EV-0030](CB-EV-0030-h1-measured.md), **this has not had the
+> tier-L adversarial review that pass owes, and none of it may reach
+> `ground-game` until that review has run.**
+
+**Delivered:** the `reactive` policy, and the measurement CB-EV-0030 §4
+named as the one it had not run.
+
+---
+
+## 1. It changes CB-EV-0030's verdict
+
+CB-EV-0030 concluded H1's DARVO arm rate was still 0. **That was true of
+the panel, and the panel was greedy-family throughout.**
+
+`GreedyPolicy` ranks `Action::Ground if gated => 100`: the instant the
+stress gate bites it grounds. Stress plateaus at 3, and the arm at 5 is
+unreachable **by construction**. So "H1 does nothing" was really "H1 does
+nothing *to a seat that already manages its Stress*" — and H1 was written
+for the seat that does not.
+
+`reactive` is greedy with **one preference changed**: GROUND demoted below
+ATTACK. SHARED GROUND, 200 games per cell, all 200 ran in every cell:
+
+| | | greedy | | | | reactive | | |
+|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
+| **seats** | won | atk | darvo | peak | won | atk | darvo | peak |
+| 2p | 68 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 1200 | **400** | **5** |
+| 3p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 1800 | **400** | **5** |
+| 4p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 2400 | **400** | **5** |
+| 6p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **0** | 3600 | **400** | **5** |
+
+**H1's mechanism works.** Criterion 1 (DARVO arm rate non-trivial) and
+criterion 2 (ATTACK selection rises for some subpopulation) are **met** —
+for the subpopulation H1 was aimed at. CB-EV-0030 reported both as
+failures, and that report was about greedy.
+
+**Criterion 3 still fails, and now worse.** Reactive wins **nothing**, at
+any seat count, under H1.
+
+## 2. The baseline finding, which is larger than H1
+
+Look at the baseline half of the same run. Greedy and reactive are
+**identical** — 132/165/190/200, zero attacks, zero DARVO, in all four
+bands.
+
+**Peak Stress across 3,200 baseline games was 1.** Starting Stress is 2,
+so no seat's Stress was ever *set* above 1: it only ever went down.
+
+> **The baseline's entire Stress economy is unreachable under this panel.**
+> The gate at 4, the DARVO arm at 5, the Freedom token that buys past the
+> gate — none of it can engage, and a policy built to be reckless with
+> Stress plays identically to one built to husband it.
+
+That is a deeper account of F17 than F17 has. ATTACK is not merely
+unrewarding; **the pressure it is supposed to answer never exists.** H1 is
+an attempt to fix exactly this, and it is aimed at the right thing.
+
+## 3. What H1-B actually does, which is not what it was for
+
+`darvo` is **exactly 400 in every cell** while `atk` scales cleanly with
+seats (1200 / 1800 / 2400 / 3600 = 3 per seat per game). A constant across
+seat counts is an artifact smell, so it was measured rather than reported.
+
+Six-player final Stress, every seed: **`[5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4]`**. Exactly two
+seats arm, whatever the table size.
+
+**The self-soothe is doing it.** An attacker at Stress ≥ 4 takes −1 for a
+landed Attack, which holds it at 4 — *below the arm* — while its targets
+take +1 or +2 and climb to 5. **H1-B suppresses DARVO in the seat that
+attacks and concentrates it in the seat attacked.**
+
+The hypothesis wanted ATTACK to be rational at high Stress. It is. The
+side effect is that the aggressor is the one seat protected from arming.
+
+**Stated as a limitation, not a finding about H1:** `reactive` picks its
+Attack target by first-legal, not by any judgement, so the *concentration*
+on two seats is partly an artifact of crude targeting. The direction —
+attackers held at 4, targets pushed to 5 — follows from H1-B's arithmetic
+and does not depend on the targeting. **The number 2 does.**
+
+## 4. What this does not say
+
+- **`reactive` is not a good player and is not meant to be.** It wins
+  nothing under H1 and exactly what greedy wins under baseline. It is an
+  instrument for reaching the Stress economy, not a claim about how people
+  play.
+- **Two policies is still not a panel.** RetrospectiveAnalysis §4.1 asks
+  for greedy, random and first-legal at minimum; this pass added a fourth
+  axis to two of them, in one mode.
+- **SHARED GROUND only.** CB-EV-0030 covered three modes; this covers one.
+- **No felt-play**, and this is the kind of claim — about pressure, and
+  when a player feels cornered — that a human table answers and 3,200
+  simulated games do not.
+
+## 5. Open
+
+- **The baseline's Stress economy being unreachable (§2) deserves its own
+  finding**, and is not raised here because it wants the plural panel of
+  §4 first. It is the more consequential of the two results in this file.
+- **Whether H1-B's suppression is intended** is ground-game's question,
+  and it is the sharpest thing this pass can hand them.