# CB-EV-0031 — a seat that does not regulate CB-WP-0039. Tier M (adds a policy to the panel every future measurement is reported against; chaos d8 = 2 → no override). **Declaration 11 of chaos window 3.** Closed 2026-08-08. > **CORRECTED 2026-08-08 after adversarial review, and most of the > original file was wrong.** The review is in > [`CB-REV-0001`](../reviews/CB-REV-0001-h1.md). The policy this pass > called *"greedy with one preference changed"* differed in **five** > places — including `SpendFreedom`, which it ranked 95 unconditionally > where greedy ranks it 0 unless the gate bites, so the seat burned its > Freedom token in round one of every game. **Every number below was > measuring that bug.** They have been re-derived against a policy that > delegates to `GreedyPolicy::rank` and overrides exactly one arm. > > Sections 1 and 2 are rewritten. **Section 3 is withdrawn entirely.** **Delivered:** the `reactive` policy, and the measurement CB-EV-0030 §4 named as the one it had not run. --- ## 1. It changes CB-EV-0030's verdict CB-EV-0030 concluded H1's DARVO arm rate was still 0. **That was true of the panel, and the panel was greedy-family throughout.** `GreedyPolicy` ranks `Action::Ground if gated => 100`: the instant the stress gate bites it grounds. Stress plateaus at 3, and the arm at 5 is unreachable **by construction**. So "H1 does nothing" was really "H1 does nothing *to a seat that already manages its Stress*" — and H1 was written for the seat that does not. `reactive` now **delegates to `GreedyPolicy::rank` and overrides one arm** (`Ground if gated`), so "one preference differs" is structurally true rather than a claim. SHARED GROUND, 200 games per cell, all 200 ran, and **`peak` is now Stress held, not Stress assigned** (§2): | | | greedy | | | | reactive | | | |---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:| | **seats** | won | atk | darvo | peak | won | atk | darvo | peak | | 2p | 68 | 0 | 0 | 4 | **66** | 726 | 363 | **5** | | 3p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 1200 | 600 | **5** | | 4p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 1600 | 800 | **5** | | 6p | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 2400 | 1200 | **5** | **H1's mechanism does reach the unregulated seat.** DARVO arms **exactly 1 per seat per game** — 600/(200×3), 800/(200×4), 1200/(200×6) — and 0.91 at 2p. The first correction said **2** per seat per game, which is wrong by a factor of two and was caught by round 2 (#3). **Criterion 3's verdict is corrected.** The original said reactive *"wins nothing, at any seat count"*. **False.** At 2p it wins **66 against greedy's 68** — indistinguishable. It wins nothing at 3p and above, which is also where greedy wins nothing. ## 2. The baseline finding, which is larger than H1 Look at the baseline half of the same run. Greedy and reactive are **identical** — 132/165/190/200, zero attacks, zero DARVO, in all four bands. **Peak Stress held across the 1,600 baseline games was 2 — the starting value, never exceeded.** Stress only ever went down. **Three corrections to what this section originally said.** 1. It reported **1**, because `peak` was a maximum over `StressSet` event *payloads*. Starting Stress is written by `setup`, never by an event, so a table sitting at 2 all game reported 1 — and a table with no `StressSet` at all would have reported 0. **Wrong subject**: the metric answered *"highest value ever assigned"* while the prose claimed *"highest Stress reached"*. 2. It said **3,200 baseline games**. The run is 3,200 *total*; the baseline half is **1,600**. 3. It generalised to *"a policy built to be reckless with Stress plays identically to one built to husband it"*. **False, and refuted by this repo's own sibling harness**: `attack-value.rs`'s rank-95 policy is exactly that policy, and under **baseline** it drives Stress to 5 and arms DARVO 400–1000 times per cell. **What survives, stated narrowly.** Under both policies measured here — neither of which ever selects ATTACK under baseline — **no Stress is ever added at all**. The baseline's Stress economy is reachable only through ATTACK, so a table that does not attack never meets the gate, the arm, or the Freedom token. That is still a real observation about F17, and it is **about ATTACK being the sole inbound pressure**, not about the economy being unreachable in general. ## 3. WITHDRAWN — "H1-B suppresses DARVO in the attacker" The original §3 argued that H1-B holds the attacker at Stress 4, below the arm, and pushes its targets to 5 — inferred from a constant `darvo = 400` and a final-Stress signature of `[5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4]`. **Withdrawn on two independent grounds, both found by the review.** 1. **The constant was the broken policy** — but a constant remains, and saying otherwise was wrong (round 2, #12). With the one-arm-override policy `darvo` is **exactly `seats × games`** at 3p and above. The constant moved from 400 to `n·games`; it did not dissolve, and whatever forces exactly one arm per seat per game is still unexplained. 2. **Disabling H1-B changes the arm count by exactly zero**, in every cell, under the corrected policy. The effect attributed to H1-B's arithmetic was an interaction with the undeclared preference deltas. **And the inference was invalid even where the numbers held.** Final Stress does not record who armed: `DarvoEnded` resets the stage to `Off` and REVERSE applies −2 to its owner, so a seat can arm and finish below 5. The review demonstrated six seats arming behind the same `[5,5,4,4,4,4]` signature. **The original hedged the wrong variable** — it disclaimed "the number 2" and defended "the direction", and the direction is the part that failed. ## 4. What this does not say - **`reactive` is not a good player and is not meant to be.** It wins nothing under H1 and exactly what greedy wins under baseline. It is an instrument for reaching the Stress economy, not a claim about how people play. - **Two policies is still not a panel.** RetrospectiveAnalysis §4.1 asks for greedy, random and first-legal at minimum; this pass added a fourth axis to two of them, in one mode. - **SHARED GROUND only.** CB-EV-0030 covered three modes; this covers one. - **No felt-play**, and this is the kind of claim — about pressure, and when a player feels cornered — that a human table answers and 3,200 simulated games do not. ## 5. The three items the review left open, now closed **H1-B on the DARVO extra Attack** — the delta says the extra Attack shares the Attack resolution *"so it can self-soothe too if Stress ≥ 4"*. CB-WP-0038 asserted it because the code shares `resolve_attack`; nothing tested it, and the withdrawn §3 ran straight through this path. `h1b_soothes_the_darvo_stage_attack_too` now covers it, mutation-verified. **Round-5 pressure did not reach the score.** `end_round_events` scored from `self` while H1-A's pressure went into `work`, and `score` reads Stress for the GR-E03 and GR-E04 tiebreaks. Fixed, and the test uses the case that actually bites: uniform pressure preserves an ordering, so it takes the **clamp** at 5 to collapse a gap and change who wins. **Its impact was claimed and never measured, and the measurement is zero** (round 2, #5). This file said the pressure was invisible to *"the two modes CB-EV-0030 reports on"* without checking. Reverting the fix leaves `attack-value`'s output **byte-identical across all 24 cells and all three modes**, including the two whose `won` column reads through the tiebreak. **The defect is real in principle and its only witness is a hand-constructed board.** **The sample size quoted here was "~72,000 games" and was not derivable from anything in this repo** (round 3, #9). `make panels` runs **17,600**: `attack-value` is 2 variants × 3 modes × 3 policies × 4 seat counts × 200 = 14,400, and `regulation` is 2 × 4 × 2 × 200 = 3,200. The figure was adopted from a reviewer's message and never re-derived — in the file whose whole correction history is about exactly that. **Inert arms, and a second wrong-subject error caught on the way.** A DARVO arm at the End of Round 5 can never advance a stage — `GameEnded` follows immediately — and ground-game's criterion 1 is about DARVO *mattering*. Now reported separately: | seats | arms | of which inert | |---|---:|---:| | 2p | 363 | **29** (8%) | | 3p | 600 | 0 | | 4p | 800 | 0 | | 6p | 1200 | 0 | **Two kinds of number are in that table and this file did not distinguish them** (round 3, #10). `600 / 800 / 1200` is **exactly `seats × games`** and holds on every sample tried. `363` and `29` are **sample-specific**: across four disjoint windows the 2p arms run 354–366 and the inert share runs **7.1%–11.5%**. So "92% of arms at 2p are live" is a fact about seeds `0..200`, not about the game — it reads 88.5% elsewhere. The same applies to the baseline win counts quoted throughout (`132/165/190/200`): the *identity* of greedy and reactive under baseline holds on every sample, the **digits do not**. **The first version of that metric was wrong and equalled `darvo` in every cell**, because it tested `g.rounds >= 5` — a property of the *game*, not of the *event*. Every arm in every completed game was marked inert, which briefly looked like "criterion 1 is not met after all". An arm is inert when no `RoundEnded` follows it. **The 29-of-363 citation has now been wrong twice and is stated plainly here.** Round 2 found it credited to `CB-REV-0001`, which did not contain the figure; round 1's reviewer *had* reported it, in its message only. Round 3 found the remaining problem (#10, #11): both "independent confirmations" used **seeds 0..200**, so what was confirmed twice is the **definition**, not the figure — and whether round 1's `StrictReactive` was the corrected one-arm policy or the five-difference one **cannot be determined from anything in this repo**, because that reviewer's code was never kept. Treat 29/363 as one sample of a quantity that varies. **Criterion 1 stands as met**: 92% of arms at 2p and all of them above are live. **`regulation.rs` no longer skips setup failures silently.** They are counted, and a short cell now **fails an assertion** rather than printing a number a reader has to notice — which is what CB-EV-0030 §3 claimed credit for and only half did. ## 6. Open - **The baseline's Stress economy being unreachable (§2) deserves its own finding**, and is not raised here because it wants the plural panel of §4 first. It is the more consequential of the two results in this file. - **Whether H1-B's suppression is intended** is ground-game's question, and it is the sharpest thing this pass can hand them.