clay-borg/evidence/CB-EV-0030-h1-measured.md

CB-EV-0030 — H1 measured

CB-WP-0038. Tier L (structural L; chaos d8 = 8 → override, redraw = L — the override changed nothing). Declaration 10 of chaos window 3, and the window's first 8. Closed 2026-08-08.

This evidence has not had its tier-L adversarial review (InnerLoop Step 2). It may not go to ground-game until it has. It is a measurement of another repo's design hypothesis, which is precisely the case the review exists for.

Delivered: variant selection in the kernel, H1-A and H1-B implemented from rules_delta.yaml, ground-game's unchanged: list asserted rather than trusted, and the ATTACK panel re-run for both rule sets.

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1. The result, against their own criteria

ground-game's success criteria (design note §3.2), answered one by one. Three of four fail.

CORRECTED TWICE. Round 1 found criteria 1 and 2 rendered as flat failures on the greedy column alone, while this pass's own harness printed non-zero DARVO arms in the rank-75 and rank-95 columns — the selective-column move, in the file that names it.

Round 2 found the correction was itself selective, and its numbers wrong (CB-REV-0002 #2): it quoted "81–1000 per cell … baseline and H1" and, twelve lines away, "31–1000". Both ranges came from the baseline rank-75 row. Under H1, rank-75 arms are 2p 59, 3p 0, 4p 0, 6p 0 — three cells at zero and the fourth below the stated floor.

Every cell is now given, because two attempts at summarising this into a range have now produced three wrong numbers.

DARVO arms per 200-game cell, SHARED GROUND (all three modes agree on arms; they differ only in who wins):

	greedy	rank-75	rank-95
baseline 2p / 3p / 4p / 6p	0 / 0 / 0 / 0	81 / 125 / 218 / 31	400 / 805 / 1000 / 1000
H1 2p / 3p / 4p / 6p	0 / 0 / 0 / 0	59 / 0 / 0 / 0	600 / 870 / 941 / 970

#	criterion	verdict
1	DARVO arm rate non-trivial, "not 0/500"	depends entirely on the policy, and H1 does not improve it for the middle one. Zero under greedy in both. Under rank-75, H1 reduces arms to zero at 3p and above. Only rank-95 — a seat that always attacks — arms freely, and it does so under the baseline too
2	ATTACK selection rises for some subpopulation	no, for the policy the criterion is about. Greedy attacks 0 times under both. rank-75's attacks fall 604 → 180 at 2p and 592/923/389 → 0 at 3p/4p/6p. Only the deliberately unregulated seat of CB-EV-0031 rises, and it never wins
3	group success does not collapse	fails hardest — greedy's wins go 165 → 0 (3p), 190 → 0 (4p), 200 → 0 (6p)
4	Bond/GROUND stay better than DARVO	holds, but vacuously: DARVO never fires

SHARED GROUND, greedy column, 200 games per cell:

seats	baseline won	H1 won
2p	132	68
3p	165	0
4p	190	0
6p	200	0

2. Why — and the mechanism is not the one H1 assumed

H1-A was meant to raise Stress toward the DARVO arm at 5. It does not get there under competent play. One 3-player game, seed 1:

	rounds	final Stress	Problems unclaimed	DARVO armed	outcome
baseline	5	0, 1, 2	0	0	9 of 7 — success
H1	5	3, 3, 3	2	0	4 of 7 — failure

Greedy spends its actions on Stress instead of Problems. The pressure is answered by regulating, so Stress plateaus around 3 — below the gate at 4 and well below the arm at 5 — while two Problems go unclaimed and the total lands under the threshold.

So H1-A behaves as a solve-rate tax, not as DARVO pressure. And since Stress never reaches 4, H1-B never fires at all under competent play: the self-soothe is unreachable by the policy it was designed to tempt.

The seat-count pattern is the tell. At 2p — three Problems, so a table can clear the board — H1 helps in SHARED (132 → 68 is a fall, but 2p is the only band that still wins at all). At 3p and above the board is bigger than the pressure allows a table to clear, and success goes to zero. The tax scales with the number of Problems; the intended effect does not.

3. The harness defect caught before the claim

The first run showed won, atk and darvo all exactly 0 at 3+ seats. That is the signature of games being discarded, not lost.

sweep had let Ok(g) = play(st, &mut ps) else { continue }; and never reported its game count, so a run in which nothing played and a run in which nothing won were the same output.

Reporting "H1 makes the game unwinnable" when the truth might have been "our harness threw every H1 game away" would have been the ADR-0018 family — aimed, this time, at another repository's design decision.

Instrumented: setup failures counted, play errors captured and printed, games != 200 reported. All 200 ran in every cell. The zeros are real, and now they are known to be real.

4. What this evidence does not say

• It does not say H1 is a bad idea. It says these two deltas, at these magnitudes, measured by this panel, do not do what §3.2 asks. Their §6 already has the branch for it: "H1 measured | DARVO still ~0 | add Idea 2 last-place stress (semi only) as H2".
• The panel is greedy-family throughout — greedy, and greedy with ATTACK reranked to 75 and 95. Plural, per RetrospectiveAnalysis §4.1, but not diverse. A policy that manages Stress badly would reach 5 and arm DARVO, and none of these do. That is the obvious next measurement and it has not been run.
• No felt-play. GROUND-WP-0003 T01–T05 runs human tables separately, and 200-game aggregates cannot say what a table feels like.

5. A tuning direction, offered as a question and not a finding

If the aim is Stress reaching 5 sometimes, the tax must outrun regulation. Candidates, none measured: pressure scaling with the number of unclaimed Problems rather than a flat +1; applying it only above a Round threshold; or lowering the DARVO arm below 5. Each is a rules change and therefore ground-game's to make, not ours to propose as a fix.

6. Cost

make cost, not inlined. One vendored catalog and one experiment package; no new dependency.

Open after this pass

• The tier-L adversarial review, before any of this travels.
• A policy that regulates badly, which is the measurement §4 names.
• H1-B has never been observed firing in a real game — only in a unit test. A delta that competent play cannot reach is untested where it matters.