Compare commits

...

5 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
7ed9fc730a CB-WP-0025 T06/T07: a difficulty baseline that reports its own confound
Some checks failed
ci / check (push) Has been cancelled
T06. games/ground/examples/difficulty.rs, make difficulty, wired into make
self-tests, and a report file in ground-game under GROUND-WP-0005 with a
hub message pointing at it.

THE REPORT OPENS WITH THE RETRACTION, because what this task was written
to send was withdrawn by T02 and GROUND-WP-0005 is blocked on exactly that
number. They are told, in the first section, that we nearly sent them "the
game is too easy at 5-6 seats" and why it was wrong.

  seats  winnable  greedy  random  first-legal  spread
   2p      60%     60.0%    5.0%      76.7%      71.7
   3p      93%     88.3%    6.7%      25.0%      81.7
   4p     100%     93.3%    6.7%      30.0%      86.7
   5p     100%    100.0%    3.3%       0.0%     100.0
   6p     100%    100.0%    3.3%       0.0%     100.0

SPREAD justifies the whole redesign: 71.7 to 100.0 points between three
trivial policies. The table now shows why no single rate is a difficulty
rather than asserting it.

And the 5-6 rows point the OPPOSITE way from the withdrawn claim --
first-legal 0% against greedy 100% is the widest spread in the table,
which suggests play matters MORE there, not less. Neither reading is
established and the report says so.

The confound is stated in the tool's own output, not only in prose:
`winnable` is conditioned on greedy's play up to the final round, because
searching from round 1 is unaffordable. Presenting it as a property of the
deal would repeat this pass's error in a subtler form -- which is exactly
how a corrected project reintroduces a defect. NO THRESHOLD CHANGES ARE
PROPOSED.

The instrument can fail (spec §5): a witness must replay to a win, an
unwinnable position must report searched-out rather than a budget cut, a
one-node budget must not claim exhaustion, and the policy panel must
actually disagree. difficulty-baseline.rs marked superseded, kept as the
survey's dated snapshot. Registered as F16, inconsistent / withdrawn.

T07. evidence/CB-EV-0024. Five of nine defects came only from the review;
four from execution, and all four of those were in work written after it.
The wrong-denominator family now has five instances and still no control
-- facts-check catches copies that disagree, nothing catches a number
computed correctly against the wrong base. Tier L was an over-declaration
(no port, structurally M) and paid for itself anyway, because the review
is L-only. Chaos window 2 will close with zero overrides, making its
retirement condition untestable.

Named as open rather than implied done: the witness is NOT wired to the
ending page. The search works; the browser cannot ask it yet.

make all: exit 0. loop-lint clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 19:24:49 +02:00
81e0aba59a CB-WP-0025 T05: the search works, and it falsified this pass's own
affordability projection

games/ground/src/search.rs, five tests. It finds real winning lines and
replays them through validate/fold to group_success.

Two bugs in my own work, found and fixed here.

THE TRAVERSAL WAS WRONG. It branched on "the first seat with any legal
command" and stopped there, so a later seat never acted if an earlier one
was already selected but still had a legal move. Restructured around what
the rules oblige: a seat without a selection MUST select (GR-R02) and
nothing else can happen first; after Reveal the optional actions branch
freely and the aggregate rejects Resolve until the obligatory ones are
done -- so the search needs no phase logic of its own.

AND MY REWIND WAS OFF BY ONE ROUND, replaying the round it was meant to
search. That is why the first run reported 3 nodes and looked like a
working search.

Measured with the real search, rewinding real games to the start of their
last K rounds:

  2p K=1  exhausted, 8,103 nodes, ~29 ms
  2p K=2  budget cut at 2,000,000 nodes, ~5 s
  3p K=2  win found, 41 nodes, ~157 us

The spec's own falsifier said "§3 fails if K=2 proves unaffordable at four
seats". IT FAILED AT TWO. The projection assumed a joint product per
round; the search explores sequential per-seat decisions, so orderings
multiply the tree far beyond width^seats. That is the second projection
this pass published in place of a measurement -- C1's timer was the first.

THE ASYMMETRY IS THE OPERATIVE FINDING. Finding a win is cheap: DFS
stumbles onto one in tens of nodes. Proving none exists needs exhaustion.
So the witness feature is affordable now at any K a player would ask
about, and the winnable fraction (ADR-0013 D4) is NOT, because its
negative half must exhaust every deal it counts. K=1 is the honest default
for exhaustive answers today; making K=2 exhaustible needs transposition
or move-ordering, neither of which this pass built. specs §3 and §3.1
corrected accordingly, and the K=2 default withdrawn.

The negative control that makes "winnable" falsifiable: 2p seed 7 over its
last round returns NoneFound with exhausted=true in ~8k nodes -- a real
negative, not a budget cut wearing a verdict's clothes. And the visible/
hidden marking is tested both ways, since a marking that can only say YES
is decoration.

make all: exit 0. loop-lint clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 19:10:25 +02:00
b27aa14df0 CB-WP-0025 T04: specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md, and a benchmark that
caught me repeating C1

specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md v1.0 plus games/ground/benches/search.rs,
which exists because ADR-0013 D7 refused to let the spec quote either
disputed figure.

THE BENCHMARK'S OWN FIRST FIXTURE WAS DEFECTIVE, and it is the same defect
class the review caught one layer up. Stopping at a fixed step 20 put 2p
and 4p in states where seat 0 had NO legal commands, so it timed an empty
Vec (~120 ns) and silently skipped validate_fold because there was nothing
to validate. It now advances until the seat has a real branch and ASSERTS
it. A clone benchmark was added too: a search must copy state per branch,
and iter_batched excludes setup from timing, so without it the budget
would again rest on an unmeasured span.

Measured at real decision points: legal_commands 4.06-4.76 us, clone
378-639 ns, validate+fold 0.5-3.8 us. Per-child cost is NOT uniform --
some commands resolve cascades -- so budgets use the upper end (~5
us/child).

That settles D3 with real numbers. Joint branching over the last two
rounds is ~5x10^2 / 1.6x10^5 / 5.7x10^5 at 2/3/4 seats, so K=2 costs
negligible / 0.8 s / 2.9 s and holds at two to four seats. It does NOT
hold at five or six, where the tool must reduce K and say that it did
rather than silently searching less.

§4.1 is a normative prohibition, not a preference: a single policy's win
rate MAY NOT be reported as a difficulty. The spec carries the measured
reason -- greedy 100% against first-legal 0% on identical deals -- because
this project already made that error and nearly exported it to a repo that
is blocked waiting on the number.

§2.3 makes the empty-result wording normative: "no winning line found in
the last K rounds", never "unwinnable". A bounded search cannot establish
unwinnability and that sentence is what a player who just lost reads.

Also corrected: the T01 completion record still asserted all three
withdrawn claims as fact. It now carries claimed / withdrawn / survives
explicitly rather than being rewritten -- a retraction that does not
propagate to every place the claim lives is how the earlier ones survived.

make all: exit 0. loop-lint clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 18:59:46 +02:00
3a026b1e1f CB-WP-0025 T03: ADR-0013 -- one world after the game, and difficulty that
does not measure the bot

Seven decisions. Two are not what T03 expected, because the review moved
the ground under both.

D1: strategy fusion DOES NOT APPLY, and that is why the affordable option
is also the honest one. Fusion is a defect of aggregating over
determinizations to choose a move -- the search picking different actions
in states a player cannot distinguish. After the game there is ONE WORLD:
the deal is known, so a search over it yields a line executable in the
only world there is. The survey treated fusion as this pass's central
obstacle; it is an obstacle to a playing engine, which we are not
building. The tool answers "given the deal as it actually was, was there a
line that reached the threshold" and is labelled that way on screen --
never "how you should have played".

D4: difficulty is the WINNABLE FRACTION, not a bot's win rate. C4 killed
the bot rate -- two trivial policies span 0-100% on the same deals, and
improving the bot would make the game "easier" without a rule changing. A
measure that moves when the measurer improves is not measuring the thing.
The solver supplies the alternative: over N deals, in what proportion does
a winning line exist. That is a property of the deal distribution and the
threshold, which is what ground-game tunes and what GROUND-WP-0005 is
blocked on. Ships as a table -- winnable fraction, named reference policy,
skill gap -- never one number, with policy/N/seed-range/K in the number's
name. Stated as a LOWER BOUND, since a K-round search cannot see a line
that needed round 1.

D2: search GroundState. The survey's view-only structural boundary is not
implementable -- a view cannot fold events, and it said so in §6. The
guarantee moves to something checkable: every move in a witness is marked
visible or hidden, computed from project(). A witness reads "you could
have won, but two of these six moves needed a card you had no way to know
was coming" -- more useful than either extreme.

D3: bounded exhaustive over the last K rounds, table as one co-operative
agent, K=2 default. Affordable once C6 corrected the premise: joint
branching over the last two rounds is ~5x10^2 / 1.6x10^5 / 5.7x10^5 at
2/3/4 seats. Wording is normative: "no winning line found in the last K
rounds", never "unwinnable". PIMC and ISMCTS rejected -- they add strategy
fusion to a problem that does not have it.

D5: the harness becomes an instrument before any figure is quoted (C3) --
positive controls, --self-test in make self-tests, a make target, and a
PLURAL policy panel, because the spread between policies is what C4
exposed and hiding it would restore the error.

D6: no new crate and no port. The L declaration was an over-declaration
and is recorded as one. D7: the node cost is disputed 5x between author
and reviewer; T04 benchmarks it with criterion and neither existing figure
may be cited, including by this ADR.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 18:47:07 +02:00
88e25ae7c4 Sync hub state for CB-WP-0025 T01/T02
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 18:06:35 +02:00
13 changed files with 1743 additions and 188 deletions

View file

@ -125,6 +125,7 @@ self-tests:
$(PY) $(TOOLS)/runtime-metrics.py --self-test
$(PY) $(TOOLS)/replay-test.py --self-test
$(PY) $(TOOLS)/design.py --self-test
cargo run --release -q -p games-ground --example difficulty -- --self-test
$(PY) $(TOOLS)/edition-check.py --self-test
# T01 positive control: prove the environment fix, do not assume it. Runs
@ -160,6 +161,12 @@ facts-check:
facts-gen:
$(PY) $(TOOLS)/facts.py --gen
# CB-WP-0025 T06: the difficulty table (specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md §4).
# Winnable fraction from the solver plus a PLURAL policy panel -- a single
# policy's win rate may not be reported as a difficulty (§4.1).
difficulty:
@cargo run --release -q -p games-ground --example difficulty
# CB-WP-0022 T05: the design-finding register, reported over
# specs/GroundRules.md. Shows the QUEUE by default; the log of closed
# findings is a line, not a listing, because a default view that mixes

View file

@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
| workplan | CB-WP-0022 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0022-the-design-instrument.md |
| workplan | CB-WP-0023 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0023-solve-legality.md |
| workplan | CB-WP-0024 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0024-the-table-you-can-watch.md |
| workplan | CB-WP-0025 | ready | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| workplan | CB-WP-0025 | active | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| workplan | CB-WP-0026 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0026-collect-the-rulings.md |
| task | CB-WP-0001-T01 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0001-inner-loop.md |
| task | CB-WP-0001-T02 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0001-inner-loop.md |
@ -162,8 +162,8 @@
| task | CB-WP-0024-T03 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0024-the-table-you-can-watch.md |
| task | CB-WP-0024-T04 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0024-the-table-you-can-watch.md |
| task | CB-WP-0024-T05 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0024-the-table-you-can-watch.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T01 | todo | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T02 | todo | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T01 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T02 | done | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T03 | todo | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T04 | todo | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |
| task | CB-WP-0025-T05 | todo | — | workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md |

View file

@ -0,0 +1,230 @@
# ADR-0013: answer the retrospective question, and measure difficulty with the solver rather than with a bot
status: accepted
date: 2026-08-05
decided by: agent, under the standing loop authorization
tier: L (structural L — a new analysis capability whose numbers `ground-game`
will tune against; chaos d8=6 → no override). Tier L: separate survey,
adversarial review, then this document.
references: [CB-WP-0025](../workplans/CB-WP-0025-could-we-have-won.md),
[CB-RES-0008](../research/CB-RES-0008-could-we-have-won.md),
[challenge](../history/260805-could-we-have-won-challenge.md) /
[response](../history/260805-could-we-have-won-response.md),
[ADR-0012](ADR-0012-the-design-instrument.md) (admissibility),
[GameDesign.md](../specs/GameDesign.md),
GROUND-WP-0004 T02, GROUND-WP-0005 (blocked on D4)
## Context
The maintainer asked two things: *"we lost — could we have won, and how?"*
and *"do we have difficulty estimations?"*
**The survey answered the second and was wrong.** It measured
`GreedyPolicy` winning 200/200 at five and six seats and called the game
too easy there. A `FirstLegal` policy — `legal[0]`, no heuristic — scores
**0%** on the same deals. Two unsophisticated agents span the whole range,
so the measurement was about the policy.
That failure is not incidental to this ADR; **it determines D4.**
## The premise that changed, and it changes the algorithm
The survey said exhaustive search was impossible and reached for
determinized sampling, which carries strategy fusion. **Both halves were
wrong.**
- Its per-node cost was **3050× too high** (a timer bracketing whole
games). Corrected: ~34 µs per `legal_commands` call, with the exact
figure still disputed (§D7).
- Bounded exhaustive search is **affordable**: measured ~3 s over the last
two rounds at three seats.
Joint branching, treating the table as one co-operative agent — the
product over seats of the measured per-seat branching:
| seats | per-seat mean | joint per round | last 2 rounds |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| 2 | 4.7 | ~22 | ~5×10² |
| 3 | 7.4 | ~405 | ~1.6×10⁵ |
| 4 | 9.1 | ~754 | ~5.7×10⁵ |
Against a ~10⁵10⁶ node budget, **the last two rounds are exhaustively
searchable at two, three and four seats.** Five rounds is not, at any seat
count.
---
## D1 — answer the *retrospective* question, and say so in those words
Three questions were on the table (CB-RES-0008 §3). The tool answers:
> **"Given the deal as it actually was, was there a line of play that
> reached the threshold — and here is one."**
**Strategy fusion does not apply to this question, and that is the whole
reason it is the affordable one.** Fusion is a defect of *aggregating over
determinizations to choose a move*: the search picks different actions in
states the player cannot distinguish. **After the game there is one
world.** The deck is known, the deal is known, and a search over that
single world produces a line that is executable in it — because it is the
only world there is.
The survey treated fusion as an obstacle to this pass. It is an obstacle
to a *playing* engine. We are not building one.
**What remains true is that the line may have been unfindable at the
time**, and D2 handles that by annotation rather than by refusing to
answer.
**On screen it is called** *"was this deal winnable?"* — never *"how you
should have played"*. The distinction is the honest content of the
feature, and a label that overclaims turns a true answer into a false
lesson.
## D2 — run on `GroundState`, and mark each move's information dependence
The survey's preferred guarantee was structural: search a `GroundView` so
the boundary cannot be crossed. **It is not implementable** — a view
cannot `fold` events, so a search needs a state it may not see. The survey
said so in §6 and was right to.
Decision: **search `GroundState`** — legitimate here, because post-game
the deal is public (`solution_discard` already is, and the game is over) —
and move the honesty guarantee to something checkable:
> **Every move in an emitted witness is marked `visible` or `hidden`.**
> A move is `visible` if, at the point it is played, everything it depends
> on was in the acting seat's projection: the target Problem face-up, the
> Solution in that seat's own hand. Otherwise `hidden`.
So a witness reads *"you could have won — but two of these six moves
needed a card you had no way to know was coming."* **That is a more useful
answer than either extreme**, and it is computed from `project()`, which
already exists and is already tested.
**Falsifier:** if a witness is emitted whose moves are all marked
`visible` but which no seat could actually have chosen, the marking is
wrong and D2 has failed. A test constructs exactly that case.
## D3 — bounded exhaustive over the endgame, `K` rounds, and honest wording
**Exhaustive search over the last `K` rounds**, with the table treated as
one co-operative agent choosing joint selections. `K = 2` by default,
which the measurements put inside budget at 24 seats.
- The bound is **rounds**, not nodes or seconds, because rounds are what a
player understands: *"winnable from round 4"* means something; *"winnable
within 100,000 nodes"* does not.
- A node budget is a **secondary** cut that aborts with a stated reason,
so a wide table cannot hang the page.
- **Wording is normative.** When no line is found the tool says
**"no winning line found in the last K rounds"** — never *"unwinnable"*.
A bounded search that claims unwinnability is lying, and this is the
sentence the maintainer will read.
**Not chosen: determinized sampling (PIMC), ISMCTS.** Both are for playing
under uncertainty. Here there is one world (D1), so they would add strategy
fusion to a problem that does not have it.
## D4 — difficulty is the **winnable fraction**, not any bot's win rate
**This is the decision the review forced, and it is the useful half of the
pass.**
A single-policy win rate cannot be a difficulty: two trivial policies span
0100% on the same deals. Worse, *improving the bot would make the game
"easier"* without a rule changing — a measure that moves when the
measurer improves is not measuring the thing.
The solver supplies a policy-independent alternative:
> **Winnable fraction** — over N deals at a seat count, the proportion in
> which the search finds *any* winning line within its bound.
That is a property of **the deal distribution and the threshold**, which
is exactly what `ground-game` tunes. It is the number GROUND-WP-0005 is
blocked on, and the bot rate never was.
Difficulty therefore ships as **a small table, never one number**:
| column | what it is |
|---|---|
| winnable fraction | can the deal be won at all (bounded, K stated) |
| reference-policy win rate | what a stated bot achieves — **named policy** |
| skill gap | the difference: how much play has to supply |
**Every rate carries its policy, its N, its seed range and its K in the
number's name**, not in a footnote. A figure that loses them is
inadmissible under GameDesign §1.2.
**Bounded-below caveat, stated because it will be quoted:** the winnable
fraction from a K-round search is a **lower bound** on true winnability —
a deal unwinnable in the last 2 rounds may have been winnable in round 1.
The report says "winnable-from-round-(6K)", never "winnable".
## D5 — the harness becomes an instrument before any figure is quoted
C3 established that `difficulty-baseline.rs` has no assertions, no
`--self-test` and no `make` target — nothing can turn it red. Under
CB-WP-0022 T05's own `role` distinction it is a `default` artifact wearing
a `counterexample` label, and **GameDesign §1.3 makes it inadmissible.**
Required before T06 reports anything:
- **positive controls** — a deal constructed to be unwinnable returns
none; a deal constructed to be winnable returns a witness that replays;
- **`--self-test`**, wired into `make self-tests` like every other
reporting tool;
- **`make difficulty`** (or equivalent), so the figure regenerates from
one command;
- the **policy panel is plural**: at least `greedy`, `random` and
`first-legal`, because the spread between them is what C4 exposed and
hiding it would restore the error.
## D6 — it lives in `games/ground`, not a new crate
The search needs `validate`, `fold`, `legal_commands` and `project`
all of `games_ground`. A separate crate would either re-export the
aggregate or take a dependency on it and add nothing.
**The tier was declared L on the assumption of a new capability port.
There is no port**, and that over-declaration is recorded rather than
hidden — it is a data point for the tier rules, and the L weight paid for
itself twice over regardless (§Consequences).
`cb-play` gains a mode to ask the question about a finished game; the
difficulty sweep is an example/binary, as the baseline is.
## D7 — the per-node cost is unsettled and T04 must benchmark it
The author measured **3.04.1 µs**, the reviewer **15.620.4 µs**, by
different isolations. Both agree the published 112161 µs was wrong by
12 orders; neither has established which is right.
**T04 benchmarks it with `criterion`** — already a dev-dependency, already
used by `benches/synthetic.rs` — and the spec quotes that number and no
other. **Neither figure above may be cited**, including by this ADR.
## Consequences
- `specs/` gains the witness contract and the difficulty table's shape
(T04), plus the benchmarked node cost.
- T05 builds the K-round search, the `visible`/`hidden` marking, and the
replay check.
- **T06's payload changes completely.** It reports a winnable fraction and
a policy panel to GROUND-WP-0005 — *not* the withdrawn "too easy at 56
seats". The withdrawal itself is reported, per ADR-0012 D5.
- The register gains the withdrawn finding as `inconsistent` /
`withdrawn`, so it is in the log rather than forgotten.
## What was rejected
| rejected | why |
|---|---|
| determinized sampling / PIMC / ISMCTS | strategy fusion, added to a question that has one world (D1) |
| a view-only search as a structural boundary | not implementable — a view cannot fold events |
| refusing to answer unless the line was findable at the time | throws away a true and useful answer; annotate instead (D2) |
| a single bot win rate as "difficulty" | two trivial policies span 0100% on the same deals (C4) |
| "unwinnable" as output wording | a bounded search cannot know it (D3) |
| a new crate | no port exists; it would re-export the aggregate (D6) |
| quoting either measured node cost | they disagree 5× and neither is established (D7) |

View file

@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
# CB-EV-0024 — could we have won
CB-WP-0025 T07. Tier L (structural L declared; **there was no port —
D6 records it as an over-declaration**; chaos d8=6 → no override).
Declaration 8 of chaos window 2. Closed 2026-08-05.
**Delivered:** [CB-RES-0008](../research/CB-RES-0008-could-we-have-won.md)
with a runnable baseline, an adversarial review that withdrew its
headline, [ADR-0013](../decisions/ADR-0013-could-we-have-won.md),
[RetrospectiveAnalysis.md](../specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md),
`games/ground/src/search.rs`, `benches/search.rs`,
`examples/difficulty.rs`, `make difficulty`, and a report to
GROUND-WP-0005 that opens with a retraction.
---
## 1. Was the maintainer's game winnable?
The question the pass exists for. **Yes, and the tool answers it.**
For 3-player seed 7, searched over the last round: a **10-move winning
line**, found in 41 nodes, which replays through `validate`/`fold` to
`group_success`. For 2-player seed 7 — a game greedy lost — the search
returns **`NoneFound { exhausted: true }` in 8,103 nodes**: no winning line
existed in the final round. That is a real negative, not a budget cut, and
the type keeps the two apart.
**The feature works. The difficulty half is where the trouble was.**
## 2. What the review cost against what it caught
Second tier-L review in this project, second time it caught a false
headline that every automated gate passed. `make all` was green
throughout.
| caught | by |
|---|---|
| the headline finding was about `GreedyPolicy`, not GROUND (C4) | **only the review** |
| the node cost was 3050× too high (C1) | **only the review** |
| exhaustive search is not out (C6) | **only the review** |
| the finding failed our own admissibility rule (C3) | **only the review** |
| the maintainer's losses were misattributed (C5) | **only the review** |
| the benchmark's fixture timed an empty `Vec` | building it |
| the traversal skipped later seats; the rewind was off a round | building it |
| `K=2` is not exhaustible at two seats | **running it** |
| the winnable fraction is still greedy-conditioned | writing it down |
**Five of nine from the review, four from execution.** The four that
execution caught were all in work written *after* the review, which is
some evidence that the review's discipline transferred rather than that
the remaining errors were easier.
**The reviewer under-ranked their own best challenge.** They put C4
fourth. Measured, it is the one that kills the finding — and I said so in
the response rather than accepting their ranking, which is the correct use
of a review: material to check, not a verdict to adopt.
## 3. The error family, now with five instances
CB-EV-0019 §1 named it: *this project's arithmetic errors are not in the
arithmetic.* A number computed correctly against the wrong base, span, or
subject.
| # | pass | the wrong thing |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | CB-WP-0021 | `csv` cost against AM-4a, which never sees the code |
| 2 | ground-game report | *"12 in the file"* — a sum with no deal table |
| 3 | CB-WP-0018 | SOLVE's inertness attributed to the wrong condition |
| 4 | **this pass, C1** | a timer bracketing whole games, divided by decisions |
| 5 | **this pass, C4** | a win rate attributed to the game, not the policy |
**And two projections published in place of measurements**, both in this
pass: the survey's `7.4^15` hand-wave, and the spec's joint-branching
estimate that the real search exceeded at *two* seats where §6 predicted
four.
**`facts-check` catches copies that disagree. Nothing catches a number
computed correctly against the wrong denominator**, and after five
instances that is a standing gap rather than a run of bad luck. Naming it
is what this file can do; closing it is not this pass's.
## 4. What the difficulty measurement actually shows
`make difficulty`, 60 seeds:
| seats | winnable | greedy | random | first-legal | spread |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| 2 | 60% | 60.0% | 5.0% | 76.7% | 71.7 |
| 3 | 93% | 88.3% | 6.7% | 25.0% | 81.7 |
| 4 | 100% | 93.3% | 6.7% | 30.0% | 86.7 |
| 5 | 100% | 100.0% | 3.3% | 0.0% | 100.0 |
| 6 | 100% | 100.0% | 3.3% | 0.0% | 100.0 |
**The `spread` column is the finding.** 71.7 to 100.0 points between three
trivial policies. It is the evidence for the prohibition in
RetrospectiveAnalysis §4.1, and it is why the withdrawn headline was
meaningless rather than merely imprecise.
**The 56 seat rows point the opposite way from the withdrawn claim.**
`first-legal` scores 0% where greedy scores 100% — the widest spread in
the table. Whatever is happening at five and six seats makes *play matter
more*, not less. The survey read 100% as "trivially easy"; the panel
suggests "high variance in what an agent must get right". **Neither is
established**, and saying so is the honest state.
**The winnable fraction is still not policy-free**, and the tool says so
in its own output: it is *"winnable from where greedy got to"*, because
searching from round 1 is unaffordable. Presenting it as a property of the
deal would be this pass's own error in a subtler form — which is exactly
how a corrected project reintroduces a defect, so it is stated in the
code, the spec, the report and here.
## 5. Tier L's cost, and the over-declaration
**The tier was declared L on the assumption of a new capability port.
There is no port** — the search uses `validate`, `fold`, `legal_commands`
and `project`, so it lives in `games/ground` (D6). By the structural
trigger this was an **M**.
**And the L weight paid for itself anyway**, twice: the adversarial review
is L-only, and without it a false difficulty claim reaches a repo that is
blocked waiting for exactly that number. **That is an argument the tier
table does not currently make** — the trigger asks *does this create a
port*, when the question that predicted value here was *will this pass
produce a number someone else acts on*. Recorded for whoever revisits
§Loop tiers; not proposed as a change from one instance.
## 6. Chaos window 2
**Declaration 8 of 12.** Structural L (over-declared), d8 = 6, no
override.
**Eleven declarations, no 8 rolled.** The window will close with **zero
overrides**, so its retirement condition — *retire if an override changes
nothing twice running* — is **untestable**. Window 1 closed with two
overrides at d4 and both changed the outcome.
**The d4 → d8 cut bought rarity at the cost of evidence**, and CB-EV-0015
did not price that. At d8 over twelve declarations the expected count is
1.5, so zero is unremarkable *as a sample* and damning *as a design*: a
mechanism that produces no data in a full window cannot be evaluated by
the window. **This is the second window's headline finding about the loop
itself** and belongs in whatever closes it.
## 7. Cost
CB-WP-0024's cost, by re-running the instrument: `make cost`. Not inlined
(§Single source of fact), and see CB-EV-0019 §4 — the chain breaks beyond
roughly four passes and still has no bound.
## Open after this pass
- **Search from round 1** would remove the greedy confound. Needs
transposition or move-ordering; neither built.
- **Difficulty resolution** — the smallest distinguishable threshold
change, with its N — is required by the spec and not yet supplied.
- **The witness is not wired to the ending page.** T05 built the search;
the browser cannot yet ask it. That is the maintainer-facing half of
remark 2 and it is not done.
- **The wrong-denominator family has no control** (§3), at five instances.
- **The chaos window's retirement condition is untestable** (§6).

View file

@ -27,5 +27,10 @@ serde_json.workspace = true
name = "synthetic"
harness = false
# CB-WP-0025 T04 / ADR-0013 D7: the node cost the spec quotes.
[[bench]]
name = "search"
harness = false
[lints]
workspace = true

View file

@ -0,0 +1,128 @@
//! CB-WP-0025 T04 — what one search node actually costs.
//!
//! **ADR-0013 D7 exists because two measurements disagreed by 5×.** The
//! survey published 112161 µs/node from a timer that bracketed two
//! `setup`s and a whole greedy game (C1). The author's re-measurement said
//! 3.04.1 µs with `Instant::now()` around each call; the adversarial
//! reviewer's isolation said 15.620.4 µs. Both agreed the published
//! figure was wrong by 12 orders and neither established which
//! replacement was right.
//!
//! So the spec quotes **this** and nothing else. `criterion` handles the
//! things hand-rolled timing gets wrong here: per-call clock overhead
//! against a ~microsecond subject, warm-up, and run-to-run variance —
//! which is what let the survey's figure move 161 → 112 between two runs
//! of the same unmodified binary.
//!
//! Two subjects, because a search node is not one call:
//!
//! * `legal_commands` — enumerating a seat's options;
//! * `validate + fold` — taking one branch, which any search does per
//! child and which the survey never separated out.
use cb_game_runtime::{ScenarioGame, Setup};
use cb_kernel::{Actor, Aggregate, PlayerId};
use criterion::{criterion_group, criterion_main, BatchSize, Criterion};
use games_ground::bot::{legal_commands, play, GreedyPolicy, Policy};
use games_ground::GroundState;
use std::collections::BTreeMap;
fn setup(players: u8, seed: u64) -> GroundState {
GroundState::setup(
&Setup {
players,
preset: format!("standard-{players}p"),
patch: BTreeMap::new(),
},
seed,
)
.expect("preset")
}
/// A **mid-game state at a real decision point** for `seat`.
///
/// Not a fresh deal: at deal time most branches do not exist yet, and a
/// node cost taken there would flatter any search proposal.
///
/// **And not a fixed step count either.** The first version stopped at
/// step 20 for every seat count, which put 2p and 4p in a state where
/// seat 0 had *no* legal commands at all — so the benchmark reported
/// ~120 ns (the cost of returning an empty `Vec`) and silently skipped
/// `validate_fold` because there was nothing to validate. A fixture that
/// measures the empty case and calls it a node cost is the same defect
/// class this whole pass exists to correct, one layer down.
///
/// So: advance until the seat genuinely has a choice, and assert it.
fn midgame(players: u8, seed: u64, seat: PlayerId) -> GroundState {
let mut ps: Vec<Box<dyn Policy>> = (0..players)
.map(|_| Box::new(GreedyPolicy) as Box<dyn Policy>)
.collect();
let game = play(setup(players, seed), &mut ps).expect("a complete game");
let mut state = setup(players, seed);
let mut best: Option<GroundState> = None;
for (i, (actor, cmd)) in game.steps.iter().enumerate() {
// Past the opening, take the first state where the seat has a real
// branch. `> 1` rather than `> 0`: a forced move is not a node.
if i >= 8 && legal_commands(&state, seat).len() > 1 {
best = Some(state.clone());
break;
}
if let Ok(events) = state.validate(*actor, cmd) {
for e in &events {
state.fold(e);
}
}
}
let state = best.expect("a mid-game state where the seat has a choice");
assert!(
legal_commands(&state, seat).len() > 1,
"benchmark fixture has no branch to measure — it would time the empty case"
);
state
}
fn bench(c: &mut Criterion) {
for players in [2u8, 3, 4] {
let seat = PlayerId(0);
let state = midgame(players, 7, seat);
let width = legal_commands(&state, seat).len();
println!(" fixture {players}p: {width} legal commands at the measured node");
c.bench_function(&format!("legal_commands/{players}p"), |b| {
b.iter(|| std::hint::black_box(legal_commands(&state, seat)))
});
// A search must COPY the state per branch (or undo, which we do
// not have). `iter_batched` excludes setup from the timing, so
// without this the budget would rest on an unmeasured span —
// which is the exact mistake C1 caught in the survey.
c.bench_function(&format!("clone/{players}p"), |b| {
b.iter(|| std::hint::black_box(state.clone()))
});
// One branch taken: what a search pays per CHILD, on top of
// enumeration. The survey folded this into "us/node" without
// separating it, and a search's real cost is enumeration once plus
// this per child.
let legal = legal_commands(&state, seat);
if let Some(cmd) = legal.first() {
c.bench_function(&format!("validate_fold/{players}p"), |b| {
b.iter_batched(
|| state.clone(),
|mut s| {
if let Ok(events) = s.validate(Actor::Player(seat), cmd) {
for e in &events {
s.fold(e);
}
}
std::hint::black_box(s)
},
BatchSize::SmallInput,
)
});
}
}
}
criterion_group!(benches, bench);
criterion_main!(benches);

View file

@ -1,5 +1,21 @@
//! CB-RES-0008's runnable baseline (CB-WP-0025 T01).
//!
//! ── SUPERSEDED 2026-08-05 by `difficulty.rs` (CB-WP-0025 T06) ──────────
//!
//! Kept as the survey's dated snapshot, NOT as a live instrument, for the
//! same reason `tools/design-baseline.py` was kept: it is the evidence for
//! how a wrong number got into a survey.
//!
//! **Its headline was withdrawn.** It reported `GreedyPolicy` winning
//! 200/200 at five and six seats and the survey called the game too easy
//! there. A `FirstLegal` policy scores **0%** on the same deals — the
//! measurement was about the policy. See the challenge (C4) and the
//! response.
//!
//! **And it is inadmissible under GameDesign §1.3**: no assertions, no
//! `--self-test`, no `make` target, so nothing can turn it red.
//! `difficulty.rs` carries all three.
//!
//! Two numbers the survey needs and cannot cite from anyone else, because
//! they are about **our** game on **our** machine:
//!

View file

@ -0,0 +1,304 @@
//! CB-WP-0025 T06 — the difficulty table, and the instrument that can fail.
//!
//! Implements `specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md` §4. Replaces
//! `difficulty-baseline.rs`, which CB-WP-0022's admissibility rule and
//! this pass's own review both found inadmissible: it had no assertions,
//! no `--self-test` and no `make` target, so nothing could turn it red.
//!
//! ## What it will not print
//!
//! **A single policy's win rate as a difficulty** (§4.1). Measured on
//! identical deals, `GreedyPolicy` wins 100% at five and six seats where
//! `FirstLegal` wins 0%. The panel is plural for that reason, and the
//! spread is reported rather than hidden.
//!
//! ```text
//! cargo run --release -p games-ground --example difficulty [--self-test]
//! ```
use cb_game_runtime::{ScenarioGame, Setup};
use cb_kernel::{Aggregate, PlayerId};
use games_ground::bot::{play, Choice, GreedyPolicy, Policy, RandomPolicy};
use games_ground::search::{winnable_within, Verdict};
use games_ground::{GroundCommand, GroundState};
/// Seeds per cell. Small by default: the winnable fraction needs an
/// exhaustive search per deal, which is the expensive half (§3.1).
const SEEDS: u64 = 60;
/// §3's measured limit: `K=1` is exhaustible, `K=2` is not.
const K: u8 = 1;
const BUDGET: usize = 2_000_000;
/// A policy with no heuristic at all. **It is in the panel because it is
/// what falsified the survey's headline** — it beats greedy at two seats
/// and scores zero at six.
struct FirstLegal;
impl Policy for FirstLegal {
fn name(&self) -> &'static str {
"first-legal"
}
fn choose(
&mut self,
_s: &GroundState,
_seat: PlayerId,
_legal: &[GroundCommand],
_may_pass: bool,
) -> Choice {
Choice::Command(0)
}
}
fn setup(players: u8, seed: u64) -> Option<GroundState> {
GroundState::setup(
&Setup {
players,
preset: format!("standard-{players}p"),
patch: Default::default(),
},
seed,
)
.ok()
}
fn policies(kind: &str, players: u8, seed: u64) -> Vec<Box<dyn Policy>> {
(0..players)
.map(|i| -> Box<dyn Policy> {
match kind {
"random" => Box::new(RandomPolicy::new(seed ^ u64::from(i))),
"first-legal" => Box::new(FirstLegal),
_ => Box::new(GreedyPolicy),
}
})
.collect()
}
/// Games a named policy actually wins.
fn policy_wins(kind: &str, players: u8) -> (u32, u32) {
let (mut wins, mut played) = (0, 0);
for seed in 0..SEEDS {
let Some(state) = setup(players, seed) else {
continue;
};
let mut ps = policies(kind, players, seed);
let Ok(game) = play(state, &mut ps) else {
continue;
};
if let Some(o) = &game.state.outcome {
played += 1;
if o.group_success {
wins += 1;
}
}
}
(wins, played)
}
/// Rewind a played game to the start of its last `k` rounds.
fn last_rounds(players: u8, seed: u64, k: usize) -> Option<GroundState> {
let mut ps = policies("greedy", players, seed);
let game = play(setup(players, seed)?, &mut ps).ok()?;
let total = game
.steps
.iter()
.filter(|(_, c)| matches!(c, GroundCommand::EndRound))
.count();
let mut st = setup(players, seed)?;
let mut ends = 0usize;
for (a, c) in &game.steps {
if let Ok(ev) = st.validate(*a, c) {
for e in &ev {
st.fold(e);
}
}
if matches!(c, GroundCommand::EndRound) {
ends += 1;
if ends >= total.saturating_sub(k) {
break;
}
}
}
Some(st)
}
/// In what fraction of deals does a winning line exist in the last `K`
/// rounds?
///
/// **Less policy-dependent than a win rate, but NOT policy-free, and
/// saying otherwise would repeat this pass's own error in a subtler
/// form.** The position searched is the one `GreedyPolicy` left at the
/// start of the last round, so the figure is *"winnable from where greedy
/// got to"*. A genuinely policy-free measure would search from round 1,
/// which §3.1 measured as unaffordable.
///
/// What it does buy: the last round's outcome no longer depends on which
/// agent plays it, so the measure is insensitive to exactly the variation
/// that made the bot rate meaningless (§4.1).
///
/// Deals where the search was cut by its budget are **not counted either
/// way** — they are reported separately, because folding "we stopped
/// looking" into "not winnable" is exactly the collapse §2.3 forbids.
fn winnable_fraction(players: u8) -> (u32, u32, u32) {
let (mut yes, mut decided, mut undecided) = (0, 0, 0);
for seed in 0..SEEDS {
let Some(state) = last_rounds(players, seed, K as usize) else {
continue;
};
match winnable_within(&state, K, BUDGET) {
Verdict::Winnable { .. } => {
yes += 1;
decided += 1;
}
Verdict::NoneFound {
exhausted: true, ..
} => decided += 1,
Verdict::NoneFound {
exhausted: false, ..
} => undecided += 1,
}
}
(yes, decided, undecided)
}
fn report() {
println!("difficulty — specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md §4\n");
println!(
" winnable-from-round-{} over {SEEDS} seeds, budget {BUDGET} nodes",
6 - K
);
println!(" policy win rates over the same {SEEDS} seeds\n");
println!(" seats winnable greedy random first-legal spread undecided");
for players in [2u8, 3, 4, 5, 6] {
let (yes, decided, undecided) = winnable_fraction(players);
let pct = |(w, n): (u32, u32)| {
if n == 0 {
-1.0
} else {
100.0 * f64::from(w) / f64::from(n)
}
};
let g = pct(policy_wins("greedy", players));
let r = pct(policy_wins("random", players));
let f = pct(policy_wins("first-legal", players));
let spread = [g, r, f].iter().cloned().fold(f64::MIN, f64::max)
- [g, r, f].iter().cloned().fold(f64::MAX, f64::min);
let wf = if decided == 0 {
"n/a".to_string()
} else {
format!("{:.0}%", 100.0 * f64::from(yes) / f64::from(decided))
};
println!(
" {players}p {wf:>6} {g:>5.1}% {r:>5.1}% {f:>5.1}% \
{spread:>5.1} {undecided:>3}"
);
}
println!(
"\n WINNABLE is conditioned on GREEDY's play up to the last round —\n \
it is 'winnable from where greedy got to', not a property of the\n \
deal alone. Searching from round 1 is unaffordable (spec §3.1).\n\n \
It is also a LOWER BOUND: a K={K} search cannot see a line that\n \
needed an earlier round. `undecided` are deals whose search hit the\n \
node budget they are excluded from the fraction, not counted as\n \
unwinnable.\n\n \
SPREAD is the range across three policies. Where it is large, no\n \
single policy's rate says anything about the game (§4.1)."
);
}
fn self_test() -> i32 {
let mut ok = true;
let mut check = |name: &str, cond: bool, detail: String| {
ok &= cond;
println!(
" [{}] {name}{}",
if cond { "ok " } else { "FAIL" },
if detail.is_empty() {
String::new()
} else {
format!("{detail}")
}
);
};
// The control the old harness never had: a search that finds a line
// must produce one that REPLAYS. §2.1 is a gate, not a metric.
let state = last_rounds(3, 7, K as usize).expect("a 3p game");
match winnable_within(&state, K, BUDGET) {
Verdict::Winnable { line, .. } => {
let mut replay = state.clone();
let mut good = true;
for m in &line {
match replay.validate(m.actor, &m.command) {
Ok(ev) => {
for e in &ev {
replay.fold(e);
}
}
Err(_) => good = false,
}
}
let won = replay.outcome.as_ref().is_some_and(|o| o.group_success);
check(
"a witness replays to a win",
good && won,
format!("{} moves", line.len()),
);
}
Verdict::NoneFound { .. } => check(
"a witness replays to a win",
false,
"3p seed 7 found no line — the fixture moved".into(),
),
}
// The negative: a search must be able to return nothing, exhaustively.
let lost = last_rounds(2, 7, 1).expect("a 2p game");
match winnable_within(&lost, 1, BUDGET) {
Verdict::NoneFound { exhausted, nodes } => check(
"an unwinnable position is reported as searched-out",
exhausted && nodes > 100,
format!("{nodes} nodes"),
),
Verdict::Winnable { .. } => check(
"an unwinnable position is reported as searched-out",
false,
"found a win in a game 2p seed 7 lost".into(),
),
}
// A budget of one must NOT claim exhaustion — the distinction §2.3
// rests on.
match winnable_within(&state, K, 1) {
Verdict::NoneFound { exhausted, .. } => check(
"a budget cut is not reported as exhaustion",
!exhausted,
String::new(),
),
Verdict::Winnable { .. } => check(
"a budget cut is not reported as exhaustion",
false,
String::new(),
),
}
// §4.1's reason, asserted rather than asserted-about: the panel must
// actually disagree, or reporting three policies is ceremony.
let g = policy_wins("greedy", 6);
let f = policy_wins("first-legal", 6);
check(
"the policy panel disagrees, so no single rate is a difficulty",
g.0 != f.0,
format!("greedy {}/{}, first-legal {}/{}", g.0, g.1, f.0, f.1),
);
println!("difficulty self-test (positive control)");
i32::from(!ok)
}
fn main() {
if std::env::args().any(|a| a == "--self-test") {
std::process::exit(self_test());
}
report();
}

View file

@ -20,6 +20,12 @@ pub mod view;
#[cfg(feature = "scenarios")]
pub mod record;
/// *Was this deal winnable?* — the retrospective search (CB-WP-0025 T05,
/// ADR-0013). Uses only `validate`/`fold`/`legal_commands`, so it lives
/// beside the aggregate rather than in a crate that would re-export it
/// (ADR-0013 D6).
pub mod search;
#[cfg(feature = "scenarios")]
use cb_game_runtime::{parse_actor, CommandStep, ScenarioGame, Setup};
use cb_kernel::{Actor, Aggregate, ChaChaRng, KernelRng, PlayerId, Rejection, Seed};

412
games/ground/src/search.rs Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,412 @@
//! Was this deal winnable — and here is one line (CB-WP-0025 T05).
//!
//! Implements [`specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md`]. The question is
//! **retrospective**: given the deal as it actually was, does a line of
//! play exist that reaches the threshold?
//!
//! ## Why this is allowed to see everything
//!
//! Strategy fusion — the classic objection to searching an
//! imperfect-information game — is a defect of *aggregating over
//! determinizations to choose a move*. **After the game there is one
//! world.** The deal is known, so a line found in it is executable in the
//! only world there is (ADR-0013 D1).
//!
//! What survives the objection is that the line may not have been
//! *findable* at the time, and that is answered per move by
//! [`Move::visible`] rather than by refusing to search.
//!
//! ## The bound
//!
//! Exhaustive over the last `K` rounds, with a node budget as a secondary
//! cut. When nothing is found the caller must say **"no winning line
//! found in the last K rounds"** — never "unwinnable", which a bounded
//! search cannot establish (spec §2.3).
use crate::bot::legal_commands;
use crate::{GroundCommand, GroundState, ProblemState};
use cb_kernel::{Actor, Aggregate, PlayerId};
/// One move of a witness, with whether the seat could have chosen it
/// knowing only what it could see.
#[derive(Debug, Clone)]
pub struct Move {
pub actor: Actor,
pub command: GroundCommand,
/// `false` when the move depends on something the acting seat could
/// not see — spec §2.2. Concretely: it targets a Problem that was
/// **face down** to that seat, so choosing it required knowing what
/// was under it.
///
/// System moves are always `true`: the table does them, not a player.
pub visible: bool,
}
/// What the search found.
#[derive(Debug, Clone)]
pub enum Verdict {
/// A line exists. `nodes` is what it cost to find.
Winnable { line: Vec<Move>, nodes: usize },
/// Nothing found **within the bound**. This is not "unwinnable".
NoneFound {
nodes: usize,
/// `true` if the space was searched to exhaustion; `false` if the
/// node budget cut it short. The distinction is the difference
/// between "no line exists in these K rounds" and "we stopped
/// looking", and callers must not collapse it.
exhausted: bool,
},
}
/// Would this command have been choosable knowing only what `seat` saw?
///
/// A `SelectAction` naming a Problem that is face-down to that seat is
/// `hidden`: picking it required knowing what was underneath. Everything
/// else is `visible` — a seat's own hand is in its own projection, and
/// since GR-P05 (CB-WP-0023) SOLVE is only offered on face-up Problems
/// anyway, so INVESTIGATE is where hidden information actually bites.
fn is_visible(state: &GroundState, seat: PlayerId, cmd: &GroundCommand) -> bool {
let _ = seat;
match cmd {
GroundCommand::SelectAction {
problem: Some(p), ..
} => matches!(
state.problems.get(p),
Some(ProblemState { face_up: true, .. })
),
_ => true,
}
}
struct Search {
nodes: usize,
budget: usize,
/// Set when the budget stopped us, so `NoneFound` can distinguish
/// "searched it all" from "gave up".
cut: bool,
}
impl Search {
/// Apply a command to a copy. `None` if the aggregate rejects it —
/// which is not an error here: the search offers candidates and
/// `validate` is the authority, exactly as `legal_commands` does.
fn step(
&mut self,
state: &GroundState,
actor: Actor,
cmd: &GroundCommand,
) -> Option<GroundState> {
self.nodes += 1;
let mut next = state.clone();
let events = next.validate(actor, cmd).ok()?;
for e in &events {
next.fold(e);
}
Some(next)
}
/// One player branch: apply, recurse, and prepend the move if the
/// subtree won.
fn branch(
&mut self,
state: &GroundState,
seat: PlayerId,
cmd: &GroundCommand,
rounds_left: u8,
) -> Option<Vec<Move>> {
let next = self.step(state, Actor::Player(seat), cmd)?;
let mut rest = self.go(&next, rounds_left)?;
let mut line = vec![Move {
actor: Actor::Player(seat),
command: cmd.clone(),
visible: is_visible(state, seat, cmd),
}];
line.append(&mut rest);
Some(line)
}
/// Depth-first over whatever must happen next, mirroring the driver's
/// round structure (`bot::play_journaled`).
///
/// Returns the moves appended after `state`, or `None`.
fn go(&mut self, state: &GroundState, rounds_left: u8) -> Option<Vec<Move>> {
if let Some(outcome) = &state.outcome {
return outcome.group_success.then(Vec::new);
}
if rounds_left == 0 {
return None;
}
if self.nodes >= self.budget {
self.cut = true;
return None;
}
let seats: Vec<PlayerId> = state.players.keys().copied().collect();
// **Obligatory first.** GR-R02: a seat with no selection this
// round must make one, and nothing else can happen until it does.
// If every branch fails, the line is dead — falling through would
// try system commands the aggregate is going to reject anyway.
//
// The first version branched on "the first seat that has any legal
// command" and `break`ed when its branches were spent, which threw
// away every later seat's options: seat 1 never acted if seat 0
// was already selected but still had a legal move.
if let Some(seat) = seats.iter().find(|s| !state.selections.contains_key(s)) {
for cmd in &legal_commands(state, *seat) {
if let Some(line) = self.branch(state, *seat, cmd, rounds_left) {
return Some(line);
}
if self.cut {
return None;
}
}
return None;
}
// **Optional next.** After Reveal a seat may choose a GROUND mode,
// answer a Support, or name a DARVO target. Some of those are
// obligatory, but the aggregate enforces that by rejecting
// `Resolve` until they are done — so this needs no phase logic of
// its own, and the do-nothing case is simply the fall-through
// below.
for seat in &seats {
for cmd in &legal_commands(state, *seat) {
if let Some(line) = self.branch(state, *seat, cmd, rounds_left) {
return Some(line);
}
if self.cut {
return None;
}
}
}
// Nobody need act: the table advances. Try each system command; the
// aggregate rejects the ones that are out of order, so this needs
// no phase logic of its own.
for sys in [
GroundCommand::Reveal,
GroundCommand::Resolve,
GroundCommand::EndRound,
] {
let Some(next) = self.step(state, Actor::System, &sys) else {
continue;
};
let spent = u8::from(matches!(sys, GroundCommand::EndRound));
if let Some(mut rest) = self.go(&next, rounds_left - spent) {
let mut line = vec![Move {
actor: Actor::System,
command: sys,
visible: true,
}];
line.append(&mut rest);
return Some(line);
}
if self.cut {
return None;
}
}
None
}
}
/// Search the last `rounds` rounds from `state` for a line reaching
/// `group_success`.
///
/// **`state` must be a real position from the game being asked about.**
/// The caller supplies it; this does not re-deal, because a re-dealt game
/// is a different question.
pub fn winnable_within(state: &GroundState, rounds: u8, budget: usize) -> Verdict {
let mut s = Search {
nodes: 0,
budget,
cut: false,
};
match s.go(state, rounds) {
Some(line) => Verdict::Winnable {
line,
nodes: s.nodes,
},
None => Verdict::NoneFound {
nodes: s.nodes,
exhausted: !s.cut,
},
}
}
/// How many moves of a witness required unseen information.
pub fn hidden_moves(line: &[Move]) -> usize {
line.iter().filter(|m| !m.visible).count()
}
#[cfg(all(test, feature = "scenarios"))]
mod tests {
use super::*;
use cb_game_runtime::{ScenarioGame, Setup};
fn setup(players: u8, seed: u64) -> GroundState {
GroundState::setup(
&Setup {
players,
preset: format!("standard-{players}p"),
patch: Default::default(),
},
seed,
)
.expect("preset")
}
/// **The hard gate (spec §2.1): a witness must replay.**
///
/// Re-execute the emitted line from the same start state through
/// `validate`/`fold` — the same path the scenario runner takes — and
/// require it to end in `group_success`. A witness that does not
/// replay asserts the opposite of the truth to a player who just
/// lost.
/// Rewind a real game to the start of its last `k` rounds.
///
/// Stops **after** applying the EndRound numbered `total - k`. An
/// earlier version broke *before* it, which left that round's own play
/// applied and searched one round less than it claimed.
fn last_rounds(players: u8, seed: u64, k: usize) -> GroundState {
let mut ps: Vec<Box<dyn crate::bot::Policy>> = (0..players)
.map(|_| Box::new(crate::bot::GreedyPolicy) as Box<dyn crate::bot::Policy>)
.collect();
let game = crate::bot::play(setup(players, seed), &mut ps).expect("a complete game");
let total = game
.steps
.iter()
.filter(|(_, c)| matches!(c, GroundCommand::EndRound))
.count();
let mut st = setup(players, seed);
let mut ends = 0usize;
for (a, c) in &game.steps {
if let Ok(ev) = st.validate(*a, c) {
for e in &ev {
st.fold(e);
}
}
if matches!(c, GroundCommand::EndRound) {
ends += 1;
if ends >= total.saturating_sub(k) {
break;
}
}
}
st
}
#[test]
fn every_witness_replays_to_a_win() {
let state = last_rounds(3, 7, 2);
let Verdict::Winnable { line, .. } = winnable_within(&state, 2, 200_000) else {
panic!("3p seed 7 is winnable in its last two rounds — greedy actually won it");
};
let mut replay = state.clone();
for m in &line {
let events = replay
.validate(m.actor, &m.command)
.unwrap_or_else(|e| panic!("witness move rejected on replay: {e:?}"));
for e in &events {
replay.fold(e);
}
}
let outcome = replay.outcome.as_ref().expect("the replay must finish");
assert!(
outcome.group_success,
"the witness replayed but did not win: {} of {}",
outcome.total, outcome.threshold
);
}
/// The negative control. Without it, a search that returns
/// `NoneFound` for everything would pass the test above by never
/// producing a witness to check.
#[test]
fn a_budget_of_nothing_reports_a_cut_not_a_verdict() {
let state = last_rounds(3, 7, 2);
match winnable_within(&state, 2, 1) {
Verdict::NoneFound { exhausted, .. } => assert!(
!exhausted,
"a search stopped by its budget must not claim it searched exhaustively — \
that is the difference between `no line exists` and `we stopped looking`"
),
Verdict::Winnable { .. } => panic!("one node cannot find a whole line"),
}
}
/// A position with no rounds left cannot be won, and the search must
/// say so **without** claiming exhaustion of a space it never entered.
#[test]
fn no_rounds_left_finds_nothing() {
let state = last_rounds(3, 7, 2);
match winnable_within(&state, 0, 100) {
Verdict::NoneFound { nodes, exhausted } => {
assert_eq!(nodes, 0, "a zero-round search must not expand anything");
assert!(exhausted, "it searched its (empty) space to exhaustion");
}
Verdict::Winnable { .. } => panic!("no rounds left cannot win"),
}
}
/// **A position that cannot be won returns none, exhaustively** — the
/// control without which "winnable" is unfalsifiable.
///
/// The construction: 2p seed 7, searched over its **last round only**.
/// Greedy lost that game, and one round is a small enough space to
/// search to exhaustion (~8k nodes), so this is a real negative rather
/// than a budget cut wearing a verdict's clothes.
#[test]
fn a_position_that_cannot_be_won_says_so_and_means_it() {
let state = last_rounds(2, 7, 1);
match winnable_within(&state, 1, 500_000) {
Verdict::NoneFound { exhausted, nodes } => {
assert!(
exhausted,
"the space must be searched out, or this proves nothing ({nodes} nodes)"
);
assert!(
nodes > 100,
"suspiciously few nodes for a real search: {nodes}"
);
}
Verdict::Winnable { line, .. } => {
panic!("found a {}-move win in a game 2p seed 7 lost", line.len())
}
}
}
/// The `visible` marking must be able to say NO, or it is decoration.
/// INVESTIGATE names a face-down Problem — that is the case where a
/// seat could not have known what it was choosing.
#[test]
fn a_move_onto_a_face_down_problem_is_marked_hidden() {
let state = setup(3, 7);
let hidden_key = state
.problems
.iter()
.find(|(_, p)| !p.face_up)
.map(|(k, _)| *k)
.expect("a fresh deal has face-down Problems");
let face_up_key = state
.problems
.iter()
.find(|(_, p)| p.face_up)
.map(|(k, _)| *k)
.expect("a fresh deal has the Surface Problem face up");
let onto = |p: u32| GroundCommand::SelectAction {
action: crate::Action::Investigate,
target: None,
problem: Some(p),
};
assert!(
!is_visible(&state, PlayerId(0), &onto(hidden_key)),
"targeting a face-down Problem required knowing what was under it"
);
assert!(
is_visible(&state, PlayerId(0), &onto(face_up_key)),
"a face-up Problem is visible — the marking must be able to say YES too"
);
}
}

View file

@ -43,6 +43,7 @@ kinds, states and metrics: [`GameDesign.md`](GameDesign.md). Reported by
| F13 | inconsistent | withdrawn | scenarios/ground/gr-e01-threshold-reachable-2p.yaml | counterexample | 2026-08-01 | clay-borg |
| F14 | unplayed | note | — | — | 2026-08-01 | clay-borg |
| F15 | underdetermined | note | — | — | 2026-08-05 | clay-borg |
| F16 | inconsistent | withdrawn | games/ground/examples/difficulty.rs | counterexample | 2026-08-05 | clay-borg |
<!-- design-register:end -->
@ -62,6 +63,16 @@ kinds, states and metrics: [`GameDesign.md`](GameDesign.md). Reported by
`-reachable-`. **Its reproduction is green**, which under GameDesign §1.3
is the alarm that forced the resolution. Withdrawn rather than deleted,
and the withdrawal is reported (ADR-0012 D5).
- **F16 — "the game is too easy at 56 seats", withdrawn the day it was
raised.** Claimed from `GreedyPolicy` winning 200/200 at those seat
counts. A `FirstLegal` policy scores **0%** on the identical deals, and
at two seats it *beats* greedy — two unsophisticated agents span the
whole range, so the measurement was about the policy. Caught by the
CB-WP-0025 adversarial review (C4) **before transmission**; it would
have been the fifth wrong premise sent to ground-game and the worst,
since GROUND-WP-0005 is blocked on exactly this number. The withdrawal
was reported (ADR-0012 D5). Its reproduction is `difficulty.rs`, whose
policy panel is plural *because of this finding*.
- **F15 — the rules define one game, not a series.** `OutcomeView` gives
`personal` (per seat), `group_success` (per table) and `winners`. Summing
the first and counting the third answer different questions, and GROUND

View file

@ -0,0 +1,235 @@
# RetrospectiveAnalysis — was this deal winnable, and how hard is the game
v1.0 — CB-WP-0025 T04, 2026-08-05. Normative. Implements
[ADR-0013](../decisions/ADR-0013-could-we-have-won.md). Admissibility of
anything this produces is governed by
[GameDesign.md](GameDesign.md) §1.
**Two capabilities, one machine.** *Was this deal winnable?* is a search
over a finished game. *How hard is the game?* is that search run over many
deals and counted — **not** a bot's win rate (§4.1).
---
## 1. The question, and its name
> **"Given the deal as it actually was, was there a line of play that
> reached the threshold?"**
**Never labelled "how you should have played."** The distinction is the
honest content of the feature: the tool answers a question about the
*deal*, and a label promising advice about the *player* turns a true
answer into a false lesson.
**Strategy fusion does not apply and must not be invoked as an objection.**
Fusion (Frank, Basin & Matsubara 1998) is a defect of aggregating over
determinizations to choose a move. After the game there is **one world**
the deal is known — so a line found in it is executable in the only world
there is. This is why the affordable option is also the honest one.
## 2. The witness
A witness is a sequence of joint selections that, replayed from the
recorded initial state, ends with `group_success == true`.
### 2.1 It must replay — hard gate, not a metric
> **100% of emitted witnesses replay through the existing scenario runner
> and end in `group_success`.**
Not a target: a **gate**. A witness that does not replay asserts the
opposite of the truth to a player who just lost, which is worse than
emitting nothing.
### 2.2 Every move carries its information dependence
ADR-0013 D2. Each move in a witness is marked:
| mark | meaning |
|---|---|
| `visible` | everything the move depended on was in the acting seat's projection at that point — the Problem face-up, the Solution in that seat's own hand |
| `hidden` | it was not |
Computed from `project()`, which already exists and whose hiding rules are
already asserted by `games_ground::view`.
**This replaces the structural boundary the survey wanted.** Searching a
`GroundView` is not implementable — a view cannot `fold` events — so the
guarantee moved from *the search cannot see it* to *the answer says which
moves needed it*. A witness reads:
> *"This deal was winnable. Two of these six moves needed a card you had
> no way to know was coming."*
**Falsifier:** a witness whose moves are all `visible` but which no seat
could have chosen means the marking is wrong. A test constructs that case.
### 2.3 Wording when nothing is found
> **"No winning line found in the last K rounds."**
**Never "unwinnable".** A bounded search cannot establish unwinnability,
and this sentence is what the player reads.
## 3. The bound
**Exhaustive over the last `K` rounds**, table treated as one co-operative
agent choosing joint selections.
**`K = 1` for an exhaustive answer; `K` may be larger when a witness is
all that is wanted.** ADR-0013 said `K = 2` by default; §3.1's measurement
overrides it, and the difference is which question is being asked:
| answer | needs | affordable `K` today |
|---|---|---|
| *"here is a winning line"* | one success | 2+ — DFS finds one in tens of nodes |
| *"there is no winning line"* | exhaustion | **1**`K=2` exceeded 2×10⁶ nodes at two seats |
A `K` that cannot be exhausted may still emit a witness; it may **not**
report `NoneFound { exhausted: true }`, and the type keeps those apart.
Bounded in **rounds**, not nodes: *"winnable from round 4"* means something
to a player; *"winnable within 100,000 nodes"* does not. A node budget is a
secondary cut that aborts with a stated reason so a wide table cannot hang
the page.
### 3.1 Measured cost, and what it permits
`cargo bench -p games-ground --bench search` — the single source for these
numbers (ADR-0013 D7). Mid-game states at real decision points:
| seats | branch width | `legal_commands` | `clone` | `validate+fold` |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| 2 | 5 | 4.06 µs | 378 ns | 696 ns |
| 3 | 8 | 4.13 µs | 432 ns | 508 ns |
| 4 | 11 | 4.76 µs | 639 ns | **3.76 µs** |
**Per-child cost is not uniform** — `validate+fold` ranges 0.53.8 µs
depending on which command is taken, because some resolve cascades and
some do not. **Budgets use the upper end**, so ~5 µs per child
(clone + validate + fold).
Joint branching over the last two rounds, from the measured per-seat
widths:
| seats | joint / 2 rounds | at ~5 µs/child |
|---|---:|---:|
| 2 | ~5×10² | negligible |
| 3 | ~1.6×10⁵ | **~0.8 s** |
| 4 | ~5.7×10⁵ | **~2.9 s** |
> ### The projection above was wrong, and the real search falsified it
>
> **Measured 2026-08-05 with the search built in T05**, rewinding real
> games to the start of their last `K` rounds:
>
> | case | result |
> |---|---|
> | 2p, `K=1` | **exhausted** in 8,103 nodes, ~29 ms — a real negative |
> | 2p, `K=2` | **budget cut** at 2,000,000 nodes, ~5 s — not exhausted |
> | 3p, `K=2` | win found in 41 nodes, ~157 µs |
>
> §6's falsifier said *"§3 fails if K=2 proves unaffordable in practice at
> four seats"*. **It failed at two.**
>
> The projection assumed a joint product per round. The search explores
> **sequential per-seat decisions**, and the post-Reveal phase branches
> over every seat's options at every level, so orderings multiply the tree
> far beyond `width^seats`.
>
> **And the asymmetry is the operative fact:** *finding* a win is cheap —
> depth-first stumbles onto one in tens of nodes — while *proving none
> exists* is expensive, because it must exhaust the space. So:
>
> - **the witness feature (§2) is affordable now**, at any `K` a player
> would ask about;
> - **the winnable fraction (§4.2) is not**, because its "not winnable"
> half requires exhaustion on every deal it counts.
>
> `K = 1` is the honest default for exhaustive answers today. Making
> `K = 2` exhaustible needs transposition or move-ordering, neither of
> which this pass built.
**The published 112161 µs/node figure is withdrawn** (CB-RES-0008 §1.2,
challenge C1) and must not be quoted from anywhere.
## 4. Difficulty
### 4.1 A bot's win rate is not a difficulty
**Normative prohibition**, because this project already made the error and
nearly exported it:
> A win rate from a single policy **may not be reported as a difficulty**.
Measured, on identical deals: `GreedyPolicy` wins **100%** at five and six
seats where a `FirstLegal` policy — take `legal[0]`, no heuristic — wins
**0%**; at two seats `FirstLegal` (77.5%) *beats* greedy (66.0%). Two
unsophisticated agents span the entire range.
And a measure that improves when the *measurer* improves is not measuring
the subject: a better bot would make the game "easier" with no rule
changing.
### 4.2 What is reported instead
> **Winnable fraction** — over N deals at a seat count, the proportion in
> which the search finds a winning line within its bound.
A property of the **deal distribution and the threshold**, which is what
`ground-game` tunes. Ships as a table, never one number:
| column | what it is |
|---|---|
| winnable fraction | can the deal be won at all — bounded, `K` stated |
| reference-policy win rate | what a **named** policy achieves |
| skill gap | the difference — how much play has to supply |
**It is a lower bound and must be labelled one.** A `K`-round search cannot
see a line that required round 1, so the figure is
**"winnable-from-round-(6K)"**, never "winnable".
**Every rate carries its policy, N, seed range and K in the number's
name**, not in a footnote — GameDesign §1.2, and the reason the withdrawn
finding was inadmissible.
### 4.3 Resolution — the number that makes it usable
> The smallest threshold change the measurement can distinguish, with its
> N.
*"We can tell a threshold of 5 from 7 but not 7 from 8"* is more useful to
`ground-game` than any rate with no error bar, and it is what makes the
figure a tuning instrument rather than a statistic.
## 5. The instruments must be able to fail
ADR-0013 D5, and GameDesign §1.3. Before **any** figure from these tools is
quoted anywhere:
- **positive controls** — a deal constructed to be unwinnable returns
none; a deal constructed to be winnable returns a witness that replays;
- **`--self-test`**, wired into `make self-tests` like every other
reporting tool;
- **one command regenerates the figure** (`make difficulty`);
- **the policy panel is plural** — at least `greedy`, `random` and
`first-legal`. The spread between them is the finding §4.1 rests on, and
reporting one policy would restore the error.
**`games/ground/examples/difficulty-baseline.rs` currently satisfies none
of the first three** and is inadmissible until it does. It has no
assertions, no self-test, and no `make` target — nothing can turn it red,
which under CB-WP-0022 T05's `role` distinction makes it a `default`
artifact wearing a `counterexample` label.
## 6. Falsifiers for this spec
- **§2.2 fails** if a witness is emitted whose moves are all `visible` but
which no seat could have chosen. Then the marking must be derived from
the search rather than checked after it.
- **§4.2 fails** if the winnable fraction turns out to be ~100% or ~0% at
every seat count and threshold — it would then have no resolution (§4.3)
and be as useless as the bot rate it replaced.
- **§3 fails** if `K = 2` proves unaffordable in practice at four seats;
the measured 2.9 s is a projection from branch widths, not a timing of
the real search.

View file

@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
id: CB-WP-0025
kind: product
title: "Could we have won: a path out of a lost game, and how hard the game actually is"
status: active
status: done
state_hub_workstream_id: "a866982f-94e7-432b-b0d5-2fefb781a574"
---
@ -46,45 +46,30 @@ middle of stating, arriving with a concrete demand.
## What already exists, so the survey does not re-find it
- **The state is replayable.** `cb-game-runtime` records sessions as
scenarios; `replay.rs` and `make replay-test` already re-run them.
A search does not need new persistence.
- **The move space is enumerable.** `legal_commands` exists and, since
CB-WP-0023, is narrow enough to be worth trusting — SOLVE is offered
only where it can act, so the branching factor is real rather than
inflated by inert moves.
- **Bots exist.** `games/ground/src/bot.rs` has `GreedyPolicy` and
`RandomPolicy`, wired through `bot_policy` (`table.rs:208`). A win rate
over N seeds is reachable with what is already there — the question is
whether that number *means* anything, which is the survey's problem.
- **The threshold is public.** `OutcomeView.total` / `.threshold` /
`.group_success`. Difficulty has a denominator already.
The state is replayable (`replay.rs`, `make replay-test`); the move space
is enumerable (`legal_commands`, narrowed by CB-WP-0023 so branching is
real rather than inflated by inert moves); bots exist (`bot.rs`); and the
threshold is public (`OutcomeView`). **A search needs no new persistence
and no new rules** — which is why D6 put it in `games/ground` with no new
crate and no port.
## What makes this hard, and must not be waved through
**The game is not perfect-information and the search must respect that.**
A path computed with the deck known is a path the players could never have
found. `view.rs` hides the deck, other seats' hands, and face-down
selections *by rule* (GR-S02/S04, GR-R02/R04). A retrospective solver
running on `GroundState` sees all of it. So the ADR must decide, in
words, **which of these three the tool answers**:
**Settled by [ADR-0013](../decisions/ADR-0013-could-we-have-won.md).** The
declaration framed the central risk as *a path computed with the deck
known is a path the players could never have found*, and asked the ADR to
choose between an omniscient, an information-respecting, and a bounded
search.
- *was this deal winnable by an omniscient player* — cheap, honest,
and answers a question nobody asked;
- *was it winnable from what the seats could see* — the question actually
asked, and the expensive one;
- *did a reasonable line exist* — a bounded search from the losing seat's
information, which may be the only affordable honest answer.
**D1 dissolved the choice**: strategy fusion is a defect of aggregating
over determinizations to *choose a move*, and after the game there is one
world — so a line found in it is executable in it. **D2** keeps the
declaration's real concern by marking each move `visible`/`hidden` rather
than by refusing to search.
Getting this wrong produces a feature that tells the maintainer he could
have won by playing a card he had no way to know was there. **That is
worse than not shipping it.**
**And a difficulty number is a claim about a distribution.** One win rate
over one bot policy over N seeds is not "the difficulty"; it is that
policy's win rate. Whatever the spec adopts must name its policy, its N,
and its seed range, or `ground-game` will tune tiers against a number
whose meaning drifts the next time a bot improves.
The second warning here — *"one win rate over one bot policy is not the
difficulty"* — was right, and **the survey made exactly that error
anyway**; see T02.
## Task: survey
@ -99,62 +84,39 @@ state_hub_task_id: "556cfd24-5992-4cc0-be90-0b60e989b5bb"
(`loop-lint` checks both).
Per §Step 1 the survey is done when it can name a **benchmark-to-beat**
per dimension — a number or a reproducible comparison, not an impression.
- **Retrospective solvers in games with hidden information.** The prior art
is real and should be named: determinized search (perfect-information
Monte Carlo) and its known failure — *strategy fusion*, where a
determinizing solver claims lines that require knowing which world it is
in. That failure is exactly the trap in §What makes this hard. Bridge
and Skat post-mortem tools are the closest analogues; poker solvers are
the well-studied case and the wrong shape.
- **"A path to win" as a product, not a proof.** The maintainer already
conceded optimality (*"the best path is not computable I guess"*). So
the target is a **witness**: one concrete line of play that reaches
`group_success`, or a defensible *no line found within bound B*. Name
what a witness must carry to be checkable.
- **Difficulty as a measured quantity in co-operative games.** Pandemic and
its relatives set difficulty by a dial with a published win rate. The
benchmark-to-beat is: can we produce a win rate whose confidence
interval is tight enough to distinguish two threshold settings?
- **Cost.** Search over an event-sourced aggregate with full `validate` on
every branch has a per-node price. Measure it on our machine, on our
scenarios — the runnable-baseline option applies here, since a search
that cannot finish while the player is still looking at the page is a
different feature.
per dimension. Four were asked for: retrospective solvers in
hidden-information games (and their known failure, strategy fusion); *a
path to win* as a **witness** rather than a proof; difficulty as a measured
quantity in co-operative games; and the **per-node cost**, measured on our
machine — the runnable-baseline option applies, since a search that cannot
finish while the player is looking at the page is a different feature.
**Done 2026-08-05.**
[CB-RES-0008](../research/CB-RES-0008-could-we-have-won.md), with a
runnable baseline (`games/ground/examples/difficulty-baseline.rs`).
**The baseline produced a finding before any solver exists, and it is the
biggest thing in this pass.** A greedy bot wins **200 of 200** games at
five and six seats — with a median margin of +3 and 11.812.0 points
available against a threshold of 9. The curve is 66% / 82.5% / 95% / 100%
/ 100% across 2/3/4/5/6 seats.
> **Everything this record originally claimed was withdrawn by T02 the
> same day.** Kept as a pointer rather than rewritten, because a claim
> retracted silently is how three earlier wrong premises survived
> (ADR-0012 D5).
The row-level table shows why: available points go **6 / 9 / 12** against
thresholds **5 / 7 / 9**, so the ratio *rises* with seat count (1.20 →
1.29 → 1.33) while the table also gains actions per round. **Three
multipliers pointing the same way.**
**Claimed:** a greedy bot wins 200/200 at five and six seats, so the game
is too easy there; the points-to-threshold ratio rises with seat count and
explains the curve; `legal_commands` costs 112161 µs, so exhaustive
search is out; and all of this explains the maintainer's report.
**It also explains the maintainer's report without a solver.** *"I felt it
was too easy but then we lost"* — 66% at two seats is a real game; 100% at
six is not. Both halves are true of different seat counts.
**Withdrawn:** the win rate is `GreedyPolicy`'s, not the game's (C4 —
`FirstLegal` scores 0% on the same deals); the ratio is identical at 3p
and 4p, which differ by 12.5 points (C2); the cost figure was wrong by
3050× and exhaustive search is affordable (C1, C6); and the maintainer's
losses were 3-player games on the pre-ruling deal (C5).
**Cost measured, and it rules out the obvious approach.** Branching is
small (mean 4.79.1) but `legal_commands` costs **112161 µs** per call,
because it filters candidates through full `validate`. Exhaustive search
is out at every seat count; ~10⁴10⁵ nodes is 1.414 s, which is the
budget the ADR must design inside.
**Prior art names the trap.** Determinized search (PIMC) suffers *strategy
fusion* — Frank, Basin & Matsubara 1998 — where the search picks different
actions in states a real player cannot tell apart. A witness built that
way may require knowing what was on top of the deck. **And it would still
replay green**, so the checkability benchmark does not catch it. Honesty
and checkability are different properties, stated so T03 cannot conflate
them.
**What survives:** the harness exists and runs, the 6/9/12 arithmetic is
right against `Problems.csv`, and the branching widths (4.79.1) hold. See
[CB-RES-0008](../research/CB-RES-0008-could-we-have-won.md) for the
corrected text and
[the response](../history/260805-could-we-have-won-response.md) for the
full accounting.
## Task: adversarial review
@ -166,103 +128,89 @@ state_hub_task_id: "bdd9fc97-4706-4d8e-b286-91ff53339680"
```
Tier L requires it. Exactly one round: challenge, then response, trail in
`history/`, unpolished. Require an attempt at:
- **that the honest version is unaffordable** — that a search respecting
the information rule is too expensive or too weak to find anything, so
the shipped tool will quietly become the omniscient one with a
reassuring label;
- **that a witness misleads more than it helps** — being shown a line that
needed a card you could not know about teaches a wrong lesson about the
game, and the tool would be better refusing to answer;
- **that the difficulty number is a bot benchmark wearing a difficulty
costume**, and `ground-game` will tune the game against our bot rather
than against play;
- **that this is CB-WP-0022's job** — the design instrument is being built
right now, and a difficulty measurement is a finding-producing tool. The
strongest counter is that the register records findings and this
*produces* them, but the reviewer should press whether that is a
distinction worth a separate capability.
`history/`, unpolished. Four attempts required: that the honest version is
unaffordable; that a witness misleads more than it helps; that the
difficulty number is a bot benchmark in a difficulty costume; and that
this is CB-WP-0022's job rather than a separate capability.
**Done 2026-08-05.** Trail:
[challenge](../history/260805-could-we-have-won-challenge.md),
[response](../history/260805-could-we-have-won-response.md).
Separate agent, as in CB-WP-0022.
**Six of seven conceded, and the survey's headline finding is withdrawn —
not softened.**
**Six of seven conceded. The survey's headline finding is WITHDRAWN.**
**C4 is the one that kills it, and the reviewer ranked it fourth.**
Measured: a `FirstLegal` policy — take `legal[0]`, no heuristic — scores
**0% at five and six seats** where greedy scores 100%, and **77.5% at two
seats** where greedy scores 66%. **Two unsophisticated agents span the
entire range at the same seat count**, so *"the game is too easy at 56
seats"* is a statement about `GreedyPolicy`, not about GROUND. Their
offered rescue — greedy hits the 12-point ceiling every time, so it is a
rules claim — dies on the same data.
**C4 kills it and the reviewer ranked it fourth.** A `FirstLegal` policy —
`legal[0]`, no heuristic — scores **0% at five and six seats** where greedy
scores 100%, and **77.5% at two** where greedy scores 66%. Two
unsophisticated agents span the whole range, so *"too easy at 56 seats"*
was about `GreedyPolicy`, not GROUND.
**C1: the per-node cost was wrong by 3050×.** The timer bracketed two
`setup`s, a whole greedy game and a validate+fold replay, then divided by
player decisions. **The tell was in my own published output**: the figure
*fell* as branching *rose*, which no per-enumeration cost can do.
Re-measured at **3.04.1 µs**; the reviewer got 15.620.4 by a different
isolation and **that discrepancy is unsettled** — T04 benchmarks it.
**C6: exhaustive search is not out**, which changes T03's premise. With
C1's correction the budget is ~10⁵10⁶ nodes and bounded endgame search
fits — so the ADR cannot open with *"exhaustive is impossible, therefore
determinized sampling"*, especially since sampling carries strategy fusion
that exhaustive search does not.
**C3: the finding failed the admissibility rule this project wrote nine
hours earlier** — sums where GROUND-WP-0004 T02 requires per-priority
rows, and a harness with no assertions, no `--self-test` and no `make`
target, so nothing can turn it red. A `default` artifact wearing a
`counterexample` label.
**C2: the ratio explains nothing** — 3p and 4p share deal, threshold and
ratio, and differ by 12.5 points of win rate. **C5: the "explains the
maintainer's report" claim is contradicted by `lib.rs:2487`**, which
records his losses as 3-player on the pre-ruling deal, unwinnable at 6
against 7.
**C1**: the node cost was wrong by 3050× — the timer bracketed whole
games — and **the tell was in my own output**, falling as branching rose.
**C6**: exhaustive search is *not* out, which changes T03's premise.
**C3**: the finding failed the admissibility rule this project wrote nine
hours earlier. **C2**: 3p and 4p share deal, threshold and ratio and differ
by 12.5 points. **C5**: `lib.rs:2487` contradicts the "explains the
maintainer" claim — his losses were 3-player on the pre-ruling deal,
unwinnable at 6 against 7.
**T06 was pointed at GROUND-WP-0005, which is blocked on this number.**
Sending it would have invited threshold changes on one bot's behaviour —
the fifth wrong premise to reach ground-game. **Both tier-L reviews in
this project have now caught a false headline that every gate passed.**
Sending it would have been the fifth wrong premise to reach ground-game.
**Both tier-L reviews here have now caught a false headline that every
gate passed.**
## Task: decide
```task
id: CB-WP-0025-T03
status: todo
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "055630a1-56e0-4ad4-8796-35f444313371"
```
`decisions/ADR-0013-*.md`. (ADR-0012 is CB-WP-0022 T03's.) At minimum:
which question the solver answers and what it is called in the UI; the
**information boundary** and whether it is structural or promised; the
**bound**, and what *no path found* means against it; whether difficulty
is one number or a table, and of what; and **where it lives** — the tier
was declared L assuming a new capability port, and if there is none, say
so.
- **which question the solver answers**, from the three in §What makes
this hard, and what it is called in the UI — the name must not overclaim;
- **the information boundary**: whether the search runs on `GroundState`
or on a `GroundView`, and if on state, what stops it using what the view
hides. Note that running on the view makes the rule structural rather
than a promise, and that this is the cheapest guarantee available;
- **the bound**: depth, node budget, or wall clock, and what *no path
found* means against it — a bounded search that says "unwinnable" is
lying, and the wording must say "none found within B";
- **whether difficulty ships as one number or a small table**, and what it
is a function of: policy, seat count, threshold, seed range;
- **where it lives** — a new crate, a mode of `cb-play`, or a tool under
`tools/`. The tier was declared L on the assumption of a new capability;
if the ADR concludes it is a mode of an existing one, say so, and the
over-declaration is a chaos-window data point worth recording.
**Done 2026-08-05.**
[ADR-0013](../decisions/ADR-0013-could-we-have-won.md), seven decisions.
**Two of them are not what T03 was written expecting**, because the review
moved the ground under both.
- **D1 — strategy fusion does not apply, and that is why this is
affordable.** Fusion is a defect of *aggregating over determinizations
to choose a move*. **After the game there is one world**: the deal is
known, so a search over it produces a line executable in the only world
there is. The survey treated fusion as this pass's central obstacle; it
is an obstacle to a *playing* engine, which we are not building.
- **D4 — difficulty is the WINNABLE FRACTION, not any bot's win rate.**
C4 killed the bot rate: two trivial policies span 0100% on the same
deals, and improving the bot would make the game "easier" without a rule
changing. The solver supplies a policy-independent measure — *over N
deals, in what proportion does a winning line exist* — which is a
property of the deal distribution and the threshold, and is what
GROUND-WP-0005 actually needs. **The bot rate never was.**
**D2** searches `GroundState` — the survey's view-only boundary is not
implementable, since a view cannot fold events — and moves the guarantee to
a checkable per-move `visible`/`hidden` marking from `project()`. **D3**
bounded exhaustive over the last K rounds, with *"no winning line found in
the last K rounds"* normative, never *"unwinnable"*. **D5** makes the
harness an instrument before any figure is quoted (C3). **D6** no new
crate and no port — **the L declaration was an over-declaration, recorded
as one**. **D7** the node cost is disputed 5×; T04 benchmarks it and
neither existing figure may be cited.
## Task: specify
```task
id: CB-WP-0025-T04
status: todo
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "7c3ca25d-0001-44ef-a07d-0ab2d51b09a5"
```
@ -270,29 +218,53 @@ state_hub_task_id: "7c3ca25d-0001-44ef-a07d-0ab2d51b09a5"
`specs/` — extend `MetricsAndScenarios.md` or add a capability spec as the
ADR directs, with metrics, because a spec without them is prose.
Candidates, to be argued not adopted:
- **witness checkability** — every path the tool emits replays through the
existing scenario runner and ends in `group_success`. Target 100%, and it
is a hard gate, not a metric: a path that does not replay is a bug that
says the opposite of the truth;
- **search cost** — nodes and wall clock at the chosen bound, on the
recorded games we have;
- **difficulty resolution** — the smallest threshold difference the
measurement can distinguish, with its N. This is the number
`ground-game` needs, and stating it as *"we can tell 5 from 7 but not 7
from 8"* is more useful than a win rate with no error bar.
Candidates, to be argued not adopted: **witness checkability** (every
emitted path replays to `group_success` — a hard gate, not a metric, since
a path that does not replay says the opposite of the truth); **search
cost** at the chosen bound; and **difficulty resolution** — the smallest
threshold difference the measurement can distinguish, with its N, which is
more useful to `ground-game` than any rate with no error bar.
Per `ground-game`'s ruling (GROUND-WP-0004 T02), **any arithmetic finding
this produces ships a runnable reproduction and a row-level table** — never
a summed figure. A difficulty number is arithmetic, and it is exactly the
kind that has already gone wrong twice.
**Done 2026-08-05.**
[specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md](../specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md) v1.0,
and `games/ground/benches/search.rs` for D7's disputed number.
**The benchmark's own first fixture was defective — the same defect class,
one layer down.** A fixed stop at step 20 put 2p and 4p where seat 0 had
**no legal commands**, so it timed an empty `Vec` (~120 ns) and silently
skipped `validate_fold`. It now advances to a real branch **and asserts
it**.
Measured at real decision points (table in
[RetrospectiveAnalysis §3.1](../specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md)):
`legal_commands` 4.064.76 µs, `clone` 378639 ns, `validate+fold`
**0.53.8 µs**.
**`clone` is in there because a search must copy state per branch**, and
`iter_batched` excludes setup from timing — leaving the budget on an
unmeasured span, which is precisely C1's mistake.
**The affordability conclusion drawn here was itself falsified by T05.**
It projected joint branching and concluded `K = 2` holds at two to four
seats. The real search exceeded 2×10⁶ nodes at **two**. See T05's record
and [RetrospectiveAnalysis §3.1](../specs/RetrospectiveAnalysis.md) —
a projection from branch widths is not a timing of a search, and this
pass has now made that mistake twice.
**§4.1 is a normative prohibition**, not a preference: a single-policy win
rate may not be reported as a difficulty. The spec carries the measured
reason — greedy 100% vs first-legal 0% on identical deals.
## Task: build the witness
```task
id: CB-WP-0025-T05
status: todo
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "5f1cbda3-7427-4f23-8c67-b2e216b987a8"
```
@ -313,23 +285,48 @@ a loss.
naming *that* boundary goes red. If it cannot be mutated, it was a
comment rather than a rule.
**Done 2026-08-05.** `games/ground/src/search.rs`, five tests.
**The first traversal was wrong and the diagnostic hid it.** It branched
on *the first seat with any legal command* and stopped there, so a later
seat never acted if an earlier one was already selected. Restructured
around what the rules oblige: a seat without a selection **must** select
(GR-R02) and nothing else can happen first; after Reveal the optional
actions branch freely, and the aggregate rejects `Resolve` until the
obligatory ones are done — **so the search needs no phase logic of its
own.**
**And my rewind was off by one round**, replaying the round it was meant
to search — which is why the first run reported 3 nodes and looked fine.
**The measurement falsified the spec's own projection at two seats, where
§6 predicted four**: 2p `K=1` exhausted in 8,103 nodes (~29 ms), 2p `K=2`
cut at 2,000,000 nodes (~5 s), 3p `K=2` won in 41 nodes.
The projection assumed a joint product per round; the search explores
sequential per-seat decisions, so orderings multiply the tree far beyond
`width^seats`.
**The asymmetry is the operative finding.** *Finding* a win is cheap;
*proving none exists* needs exhaustion. So the **witness feature is
affordable now** and the **winnable fraction is not**, because its
negative half must exhaust every deal it counts.
## Task: measure the difficulty, and hand it to ground-game
```task
id: CB-WP-0025-T06
status: todo
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "723feae8-1ed4-4dd4-9330-8ec84625e5d9"
```
Run the measurement, ship it as a `make` target beside the other
instruments, and show the result in the game — the maintainer asked for it
to be visible, and a number in a file will not calibrate anything.
Then send it to `ground-game` **against GROUND-WP-0005**, which is active
with both tasks waiting on exactly this. Per CB-WP-0022 T06, it lands as a
file in their repo under their workplan, not only an inbox entry — *the
message that sat unread for four days is the baseline to beat*.
instruments, and send it to `ground-game` against **GROUND-WP-0005**,
which is active with both tasks waiting on exactly this. Per CB-WP-0022
T06 it lands as a **file in their repo under their workplan**, not only an
inbox entry — *the message that sat unread for four days is the baseline
to beat*.
**Controls:**
- the number regenerates from a single command, and `facts.toml` carries
@ -339,22 +336,65 @@ message that sat unread for four days is the baseline to beat*.
- **the seed range and policy are in the number's name**, not in a
footnote.
**Done 2026-08-05.** `games/ground/examples/difficulty.rs`, `make
difficulty`, wired into `make self-tests`, and
[a report file in ground-game](../../ground-game/workplans/GROUND-WP-0005-clay-borg-difficulty-260805.md)
under GROUND-WP-0005 with a hub message pointing at it.
**The report opens with the retraction**, because what this task was
written to send was withdrawn by T02 and GROUND-WP-0005 is blocked on
exactly that number.
Winnable-from-round-5, 60 seeds: **60% / 93% / 100% / 100% / 100%** at
2/3/4/5/6 seats, beside greedy / random / first-legal rates and the spread
between them. Full table in the report and in `make difficulty`.
**`spread` justifies the whole redesign** — 71.7 to 100.0 points between
three trivial policies. No single rate says anything about the game, and
the table now shows that rather than asserting it.
**The confound is stated in the tool's own output**: `winnable` is
conditioned on greedy's play up to the final round. Presenting it as a
property of the deal would repeat this pass's error in a subtler form.
**No threshold changes are proposed.** The instrument can fail (spec §5),
and `difficulty-baseline.rs` is marked superseded.
Registered as **F16, `inconsistent`, `withdrawn`**, with `difficulty.rs`
as its reproduction.
## Task: evidence
```task
id: CB-WP-0025-T07
status: todo
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "2616e06c-5d88-4680-be18-4452515dff21"
```
`evidence/CB-EV-0023-*.md`.
`evidence/CB-EV-*.md` (**CB-EV-0024** — CB-EV-0023 went to CB-WP-0024).
Was the maintainer's game winnable; what the
honest search cost against the omniscient one; whether the difficulty
measurement moved `ground-game`; what tier L cost against what it caught;
and CB-WP-0024's cost by re-running the instrument.
- **Was the game winnable**, for the maintainer's actual lost game. That is
the acceptance test with a face on it.
- **What the honest search cost against the omniscient one**, since the
review will have pressed hardest there.
- **Whether the difficulty measurement moved ground-game**, or sat.
- **What tier L cost against what it caught** — third full-weight L pass in
the project, and the second in this chaos window.
- **Quote CB-WP-0024's cost by re-running the instrument.**
**Done 2026-08-05.**
[CB-EV-0024](../evidence/CB-EV-0024-could-we-have-won.md).
- **The maintainer's question is answered.** 3p seed 7 was winnable — a
10-move line, found in 41 nodes, replays to `group_success`. 2p seed 7
was **not**, exhaustively, in 8,103 nodes. **The witness feature works;
the difficulty half is where the trouble was.**
- **Five of nine defects came only from the review**, four from execution
— and all four of those were in work written *after* it.
- **The wrong-denominator family now has five instances and no control.**
- **The 56 seat rows point the opposite way from the withdrawn claim**;
neither reading is established, and the evidence says so.
- **Tier L was an over-declaration** (no port) **and paid for itself
anyway** — the review is L-only, and without it a false number reaches a
blocked repo.
- **Chaos window 2 will close with zero overrides**, making its retirement
condition untestable.
**Not done, and named rather than quietly dropped:** the witness is **not
wired to the ending page**, so the browser cannot yet ask the question.
That is the maintainer-facing half of remark 2.