clay-borg/workplans/CB-WP-0023-solve-legality.md

id	kind	title	status	state_hub_workstream_id
CB-WP-0023	product	SOLVE is offered only where it can do something	done	ae3a1491-4417-4cb2-b490-b694463cc171

Purpose

structural tier  S   (implements a ruling inside an existing capability —
                      no new port, no canonical interface, no dependency)
chaos            d8 = 6  → no override
declared tier    S

Declaration 6 of chaos window 2.

A ruling, not a judgment call

ground-game ruled SOLVE's legality on 2026-08-03 (GROUND-WP-0002 T02), after clay-borg raised it from play:

sub	ruling
(a) face-down Problem	Not offered — illegal target. "only face-up, non-Denied. Browser no-ops were a filter bug, not a bluff mechanic."
(b) no matching Solution in hand	Not offered. "the engine only offers SOLVE when a matching suit is held."
(c) already-claimed Problem	Same-round race legal; prior-round claim not offered.

The bluff reading is dead. CB-WP-0018 raised (a) as possibly an intended bluff in a commit/reveal game and deferred to ground-game rather than deciding. The answer is that it was a filter bug, and the engine has been offering an inert move since the day legal_commands was written.

legal_commands offers Investigate and SOLVE on every problem key, with no reference to face_up, denied, claimed_by or the hand.

Only SOLVE is ruled on. Investigate is not touched — implementing more than was ruled would be inventing rules, which is what this whole exchange exists to stop.

Task: filter SOLVE to what the ruling allows

id: CB-WP-0023-T01
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "52637f6f-314f-4715-9d81-5e9bea8ced97"

SOLVE is offered on problem p for seat s iff p.face_up, !p.denied, p.claimed_by.is_none(), and s's hand holds a card of p.suit.

On (c): at Select time every claimed_by is from a prior round — claims land at Resolve — so "prior-round claim not offered" is exactly claimed_by.is_none(), and the same-round race is already legal because both seats select before either resolves. Say this in the code, or the next reader will add a round comparison that does nothing.

Controls:

• each of the four conditions must be independently mutation-provable — drop one filter, and a test naming that condition goes red;
• the maintainer's reported case must be reproduced and then fixed: SOLVE on a face-down Problem is offered before, not offered after;
• make sim must still pass, or the ruling has broken a scenario that encoded the old behaviour — in which case the scenario was encoding a bug and must be updated with a note, not quietly edited.

Done 2026-08-04. make all exits 0, 26 scenarios, rule coverage 59/59. No scenario encoded the bug — all 25 passed unchanged.

The rule ended up somewhere other than where I put it, and a gate moved it. It went into legal_commands first. The AM-1 coverage gate then demanded a scenario for the new GR-P05 — and scenarios drive validate, not the offer layer. That is what showed the rule belonged in validate: a rule enforced only by the offer is enforced only for clients that ask what is legal. The browser would have been filtered and a scenario file would have walked straight past it.

Once GR-P05 moved into validate, every condition in legal_commands was dead code, and my own layering test said so in those words ("validate now rejects claimed — drop the filter"). The offer layer is back to one arm for Investigate and SOLVE together.

And the reported case was not the one I reported. CB-WP-0018 and the message to ground-game described SOLVE offered on a face-down Problem. Measured: validate already rejected face-down, so it never was offered. Problem 1 is the Surface Problem and is face-up from the deal — the maintainer's three inert SOLVEs were the hand case, holding no Clarify for a Clarify Problem. The ruling covers both, so nothing is invalidated, but the record was wrong and is corrected here.

Four conditions, each asserted separately, because one "SOLVE is filtered" test would pass with three of four implemented. Mutations: dropping the claimed filter and dropping the hand filter each turn their own test red; inverting the layering assertion turns validate_enforces_all_four red.

Task: retire what the ruling settles

id: CB-WP-0023-T02
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "4a436635-2eff-42b1-957c-fdb8b310f910"

Update specs/GroundRules.md §Underdetermined for the SOLVE items, and retire the provisional flags the ruling closes. A ruling that lands in code but not in the spec leaves the next reader with two sources.

Report to ground-game that the ruling is implemented — closing the loop is the part that has failed twice.

Done 2026-08-04. specs/GroundRules.md gains GR-P05 stating the rule and recording that the bluff reading is dead, and scenarios/ground/gr-p05-solve-legality.yaml covers it — P1 refused for holding no Clarify, P2 admitted and claiming. The prior-round-claim half is asserted in the unit test instead, because reaching a second round costs a dozen commands to test one rejection, and that is said in the scenario rather than left as a gap.

Task: evidence

id: CB-WP-0023-T03
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "3a05165c-df33-4668-8ca2-2340789b3531"

evidence/CB-EV-0020-*.md. Short.

• How long the inert move survived, and what it cost: a maintainer played SOLVE three rounds running with no effect and no explanation.
• Whether any scenario encoded the bug.
• Quote CB-WP-0022's cost by re-running the instrument.