---
id: CB-WP-0039
kind: product
title: "A seat that does not regulate"
status: done
---

# Purpose

```
structural tier  M   (adds a policy to the panel every future difficulty
                      and design measurement is reported against)
chaos            d8 = 2  → no override
declared tier    M
```

**Declaration 11 of chaos window 3.**

## Why

[CB-EV-0030](../evidence/CB-EV-0030-h1-measured.md) §4 named this as the
measurement it had not run, and it is the one that decides whether H1's
verdict is about **H1** or about **greedy**.

H1 assumes rising Stress pushes a table toward the DARVO arm. It does not,
**because greedy regulates**: `Action::Ground if gated => 100` makes
GROUND the top choice the moment the stress gate bites, so Stress
plateaus at 3 and neither the gate (4) nor the arm (5) is ever reached.

> **Every policy in that panel was greedy-family.** So "H1 does nothing"
> may be "H1 does nothing *to a seat that already manages its Stress*" —
> and H1 was written for the seat that does not.

## The one preference that varies

`Reactive` is `GreedyPolicy` with **GROUND demoted below ATTACK**, and
nothing else changed. It is the player who chases Problems and ignores
their own state — which is not a straw man: it is the commonest way a
person plays a co-operative game badly, and the behaviour GROUND's whole
Stress economy exists to punish.

**One preference, per ADR-0018 and the same discipline as
`attack-value.rs`'s `Attacker`.** A policy that differed in several places
would tell us a variant is different without saying which difference did
the work.

## Task: the policy, and the measurement

```task
id: CB-WP-0039-T01
status: done
priority: high
```

**Controls:**
- **exactly one preference differs from greedy**, and the artifact says
  which;
- **both variants, same instrument, same run** — otherwise the comparison
  is between harnesses;
- **the game count is reported**, because CB-EV-0030 §3's harness defect
  was silently discarding games and printing zeros that read as losses;
- **the answer may be that H1 still fails**, and that is reported as
  plainly as the other outcome.

**Done 2026-08-08.**
[CB-EV-0031](../evidence/CB-EV-0031-a-seat-that-does-not-regulate.md).

**It changed CB-EV-0030's verdict.** H1's criteria 1 and 2 are **met** for
the seat H1 was aimed at: DARVO arms 400 times per cell and ATTACK is
selected 3 times per seat per game. The earlier "H1 does nothing" was a
statement about greedy, which grounds the moment the gate bites.

**Criterion 3 fails harder**: reactive wins nothing, at any seat count.

**The larger finding is about the baseline, not H1.** Greedy and reactive
play *identically* under baseline — same wins, zero attacks, zero DARVO —
and **peak Stress across 3,200 baseline games was 1**, against a starting
value of 2. The gate at 4, the arm at 5 and the Freedom token are all
unreachable. That is a deeper account of F17 than F17 has, and it is
**not raised as a finding here** because it wants the plural panel first.

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