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>

workplans/CB-WP-0039-a-seat-that-does-not-regulate.md

@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
+---
+id: CB-WP-0039
+kind: product
+title: "A seat that does not regulate"
+status: done
+---
+
+# Purpose
+
+```
+structural tier  M   (adds a policy to the panel every future difficulty
+                      and design measurement is reported against)
+chaos            d8 = 2  → no override
+declared tier    M
+```
+
+**Declaration 11 of chaos window 3.**
+
+## Why
+
+[CB-EV-0030](../evidence/CB-EV-0030-h1-measured.md) §4 named this as the
+measurement it had not run, and it is the one that decides whether H1's
+verdict is about **H1** or about **greedy**.
+
+H1 assumes rising Stress pushes a table toward the DARVO arm. It does not,
+**because greedy regulates**: `Action::Ground if gated => 100` makes
+GROUND the top choice the moment the stress gate bites, so Stress
+plateaus at 3 and neither the gate (4) nor the arm (5) is ever reached.
+
+> **Every policy in that panel was greedy-family.** So "H1 does nothing"
+> may be "H1 does nothing *to a seat that already manages its Stress*" —
+> and H1 was written for the seat that does not.
+
+## The one preference that varies
+
+`Reactive` is `GreedyPolicy` with **GROUND demoted below ATTACK**, and
+nothing else changed. It is the player who chases Problems and ignores
+their own state — which is not a straw man: it is the commonest way a
+person plays a co-operative game badly, and the behaviour GROUND's whole
+Stress economy exists to punish.
+
+**One preference, per ADR-0018 and the same discipline as
+`attack-value.rs`'s `Attacker`.** A policy that differed in several places
+would tell us a variant is different without saying which difference did
+the work.
+
+## Task: the policy, and the measurement
+
+```task
+id: CB-WP-0039-T01
+status: done
+priority: high
+```
+
+**Controls:**
+- **exactly one preference differs from greedy**, and the artifact says
+  which;
+- **both variants, same instrument, same run** — otherwise the comparison
+  is between harnesses;
+- **the game count is reported**, because CB-EV-0030 §3's harness defect
+  was silently discarding games and printing zeros that read as losses;
+- **the answer may be that H1 still fails**, and that is reported as
+  plainly as the other outcome.
+
+**Done 2026-08-08.**
+[CB-EV-0031](../evidence/CB-EV-0031-a-seat-that-does-not-regulate.md).
+
+**It changed CB-EV-0030's verdict.** H1's criteria 1 and 2 are **met** for
+the seat H1 was aimed at: DARVO arms 400 times per cell and ATTACK is
+selected 3 times per seat per game. The earlier "H1 does nothing" was a
+statement about greedy, which grounds the moment the gate bites.
+
+**Criterion 3 fails harder**: reactive wins nothing, at any seat count.
+
+**The larger finding is about the baseline, not H1.** Greedy and reactive
+play *identically* under baseline — same wins, zero attacks, zero DARVO —
+and **peak Stress across 3,200 baseline games was 1**, against a starting
+value of 2. The gate at 4, the arm at 5 and the Freedom token are all
+unreachable. That is a deeper account of F17 than F17 has, and it is
+**not raised as a finding here** because it wants the plural panel first.
+
+**A constant was investigated rather than reported.** `darvo` was exactly
+400 in every cell while `atk` scaled properly 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.