simulators/: persist the survey, and let it shrink two of the three tracks

Eight profiles on a common schema, each marking what was checked against a
source this session and what is background recollection. Three are marked
unverified in full — Machinations, the play substrates, most of RBG — and
say so rather than reading as evaluations. Written straight after three
review rounds whose entire yield was claims outrunning what had been
checked, so the confidence rule is the first thing in the README.

The survey changed the plan, which is what a survey is for.

Track C was described in Positioning as open ground. It is not: Browne
published 57 criteria for game quality, and Ai Ai already computes
designer-facing measures — drama, lead changes, branching factor,
completion, duration — from played games. The track becomes adopt, credit
and find the gap. The gap looks real: those measures presume a leader, and
SHARED GROUND has none — Modes.csv gives its tiebreak as "Not applicable".

Track B probably adopts rather than builds. OpenSpiel implements CFR,
best-response and exploitability over games that are simultaneous-move,
imperfect-information and co-operative, which is all four of GROUND's
awkward properties. "Does ATTACK ever pay" is a best-response question,
and we spent three review rounds refining a two-policy sweep for it. The
first Track B task is now one question — is exploitability meaningful for
a co-operative game with a shared threshold — not a build.

The cost of not surveying earlier is therefore measurable, and is recorded
rather than glossed.

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

specs/Positioning.md

@@ -5,7 +5,12 @@ the point of it"*, written against the field rather than in isolation.
 
 Companion to [`../INTENT.md`](../INTENT.md) (what we are building),
 [`Taxonomy.md`](Taxonomy.md) (the vocabulary), and
-[`Ornamentation.md`](Ornamentation.md) (the boundary).
+[`Ornamentation.md`](Ornamentation.md) (the boundary). The systems named
+below have profiles in [`../simulators/`](../simulators), each marking
+what was checked and what is background recollection.
+
+> **Revised 2026-08-08 after the survey**, and §4 changed. Two of the
+> three tracks were described as more open than they are — see §4.0.
 
 ---
 
@@ -84,6 +89,30 @@ the number.
 
 Three tracks, in dependency order. None started.
 
+### 4.0 What the survey changed
+
+**Two tracks were overclaimed and are now smaller.** Writing the
+[`simulators/`](../simulators) profiles found prior art where this
+document had assumed open ground:
+
+- **Track C is not open ground.** **Browne published 57 criteria for game
+  quality**, and **Ai Ai** already computes designer-facing measures —
+  drama, lead changes, branching factor, completion, duration — from
+  played games. The track moves from *invent a theory of fun* to **adopt
+  an existing vocabulary, credit it, and locate the gap**. The gap is
+  plausibly real (co-operative and hidden-role games), and it is a far
+  smaller and more defensible claim.
+- **Track B probably adopts rather than builds.** **OpenSpiel** implements
+  CFR, best-response and **exploitability** over games that are
+  simultaneous-move, imperfect-information and cooperative — all four of
+  GROUND's awkward properties. *"Does ATTACK ever pay"* is a
+  best-response question, and we have been answering it with two
+  hand-written policies.
+
+**This is what a survey is for**, and it is worth noting that the cost of
+not doing it earlier was measurable: we spent three review rounds refining
+a two-policy sweep for a question that has a standard instrument.
+
 ### Track A — a second game
 
 **GROUND is an example, and nothing has tested that claim.** Every
@@ -121,18 +150,33 @@ instrument for questions that have real theory behind them:
 that reads a clay-borg game definition and a panel run, and reports what
 the theory says about the dynamics — with the same admissibility rules as
 everything else, because a Nash equilibrium quoted without its assumptions
-is exactly the wrong-subject error in mathematical dress.
+is exactly the wrong-subject error in mathematical dress
+([`Taxonomy.md`](Taxonomy.md) §2.2).
+
+**But the first task is not to build it.** It is to answer one question:
+**is exploitability meaningful for a co-operative game with a shared
+threshold?** If yes, Track B is mostly integration with
+[OpenSpiel](../simulators/openspiel.md). If no, that is a real research
+finding and the reason a specialised agent is needed at all.
 
 ### Track C — assimilated knowledge about why games work
 
 The furthest out, and the one the maintainer named as the point:
 **make what is known about game dynamics available to designers.**
 
-MDA's aesthetics vocabulary, the balance literature, documented failure
-modes (runaway leader, kingmaking, analysis paralysis, dominant strategy,
-degenerate equilibrium). The value is not a database — it is that a
-finding from a panel run can be **named** as an instance of a known
-pattern, and the designer told what usually follows.
+MDA's aesthetics vocabulary, **Browne's criteria**, the balance
+literature, documented failure modes (runaway leader, kingmaking, analysis
+paralysis, dominant strategy, degenerate equilibrium). The value is not a
+database — it is that a finding from a panel run can be **named** as an
+instance of a known pattern, and the designer told what usually follows.
+
+**And the gap is now visible.** The criteria that exist assume a leader:
+*lead change* and *drama* are defined against who is ahead. **SHARED
+GROUND has no individual leader** — `Modes.csv` gives its tiebreak as
+"Not applicable" — so the canonical vocabulary does not reach the game we
+have. Whether these measures extend to co-operative and hidden-role play
+is the open question, and it is a better Track C than the one this
+document originally proposed.
 
 **The risk is obvious and worth stating now**: this track is where a tool
 starts telling designers what is fun, on the strength of numbers that