The maintainer could not tell whether "error", "failure", "finding" or
"correction" referred to the game's design, our formalisation of it, the
code, the measuring apparatus, or the sentences we wrote. Three review
rounds produced twenty-odd defect statements spanning five systems, all
called errors. The confusion was ours.
specs/Taxonomy.md, grounded in named canon rather than invented here: six
strata from Sargent's problem entity / conceptual model / computerized
model, extended where a simulation-V&V frame stops — we also own an
instrument and an account. The two relations are what was missing:
GAME<->MODEL is validation, MODEL<->ENGINE is verification, and nearly
every argument about "our bug or their gap" was that distinction going
unnamed.
Fault/error/failure from Avizienis et al., applied within a stratum, plus
the rule that explains the review history: a failure in one stratum is a
fault in the next. And it finally defines the family ADR-0018 could only
point at — a wrong-subject error is an ACCOUNT failure with no INSTRUMENT
fault, which is why tests never catch them.
MDA supplies the game-facing layers and one hard limit: our panels measure
dynamics, our trial logs sample aesthetics, and a win rate does not answer
"is it fun".
specs/Positioning.md names the field fairly — Ludii is the closest
relative and the right benchmark — and the four differentiators, each
already built rather than aspired to. Clay-borg is a design-evidence
instrument; anyone can produce the number. Three tracks named and none
started: a second game, game theory as the lens on dynamics, and
assimilated knowledge about why games work.
Track A is the falsifier for the whole positioning: every abstraction here
has exactly one instance, which by our own rule may mean invented rather
than observed.
Chaos window 3 closes at 12 declarations with one override that changed
nothing. Its verdict is due and is deliberately not written here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
