clay-borg/specs/FindingRegister.md

The finding register

Design findings about GROUND, with their reproductions. Governed by GameDesign.md (admissibility, kinds, states, metrics) and ADR-0012. Reported by make design.

Split out of GroundRules.md §Underdetermined on 2026-08-05 when that file crossed the ~400-line loadability limit. ADR-0012 D2 said "no new file" and this is a new file — but D2's substance was one register, not a second mechanism competing with the first, and that holds: this is §Underdetermined's register, moved, still driving off the same provisional/ruling machinery. D2 also named the awkwardness this resolves — a finding about the engine sitting in a document about the game.

The U-items themselves, with their defaults and rulings, stay in GroundRules.md §Underdetermined; this file tracks them as findings.

This section is the design-finding register (ADR-0012 D2). It was the register for dataset ambiguities already; CB-WP-0022 extended it to all five kinds rather than building a second one beside it. Admissibility, kinds, states and metrics: GameDesign.md. Reported by make design.

id	kind	state	reproduction	role	raised	owner
U1	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U2	underdetermined	applied	scenarios/ground/gr-d01-darvo-trigger.yaml	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U3	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U4	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U5	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U6	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U7	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U8	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U9	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
U10	underdetermined	applied	—	default	2026-07-31	ground-game
F11	inert	applied	scenarios/ground/gr-p05-solve-legality.yaml	counterexample	2026-08-02	clay-borg
F12	degenerate	note	—	—	2026-08-01	clay-borg
F13	inconsistent	withdrawn	scenarios/ground/gr-e01-threshold-reachable-2p.yaml	counterexample	2026-08-01	clay-borg
F14	unplayed	applied	games/ground/examples/attack-value.rs	counterexample	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F16	inconsistent	withdrawn	games/ground/examples/difficulty.rs	counterexample	2026-08-05	clay-borg
F17	degenerate	raised	games/ground/examples/attack-value.rs	counterexample	2026-08-06	ground-game
F18	inert	raised	games/ground/src/edition.rs::card_text_tests::the_engine_reads_only_part_of_what_it_vendored	counterexample	2026-08-06	clay-borg
F25	inert	raised	games/ground/src/edition.rs::card_text_tests::the_engine_agrees_with_the_editions_own_numbers	default	2026-08-08	clay-borg
F24	inert	raised	games/ground/src/edition.rs::card_text_tests::the_hardcoded_deck_still_matches_the_edition	default	2026-08-07	clay-borg
F19	degenerate	applied	crates/cb-render-html/src/lib.rs::overhead_table	counterexample	2026-08-06	clay-borg
F20	inert	applied	crates/cb-render-html/src/lib.rs::ending_page	counterexample	2026-08-06	clay-borg
F21	degenerate	note	—	—	2026-08-06	clay-borg
F23	inconsistent	applied	decisions/ADR-0017-chaos-window-2-verdict.md	counterexample	2026-08-07	clay-borg
F22	underdetermined	withdrawn	games_ground::edition::supply_tests::play_never_exceeds_the_components_the_box_holds	counterexample	2026-08-07	clay-borg
F26	inert	raised	crates/cb-render-html/src/lib.rs::a_scoped_table_says_what_a_scope_does	counterexample	2026-08-08	ground-game
F27	unplayed	reported	games/ground/examples/scenario-panel.rs	counterexample	2026-08-08	clay-borg
F28	underdetermined	raised	games_ground::tests::the_mastery_rating_and_the_shared_score_count_different_things	counterexample	2026-08-08	ground-game

• F27 — the two competitive modes are scoring lenses over cooperative play. scenario-panel finds group success exactly equal across SHARED GROUND, COMMON PROBLEM and BONDED COALITIONS in all 36 cells. Correct arithmetic: GreedyPolicy maximises the group outcome and never reads state.mode, so the same games are played and only the winner set is carved differently. Whether a mode changes how GROUND is played is therefore untested, and cannot be tested by any panel built from the current policies — it needs one that plays for personal score. unplayed rather than inert: the modes score correctly, they have simply never faced a seat that wanted to win alone.

  Re-measured 2026-08-08 with ObjectivePolicy (CB-WP-0049 T03), which plays its seat's own objective. The finding splits in two:

  • Group success does not move. 34 of 36 cells identical; SCN_03 at 4p goes 99→100 in all three modes, which is the SOLVE-by-value refinement and not a mode effect. Whether the table survives is the same game in all three modes.
  • Who wins does move. Under BONDED COALITIONS at 4p, winning seats per game go 2.04 → 2.98 (SCN_01/02), 2.12 → 3.29 (SCN_03), 2.05 → 3.01 (SCN_04): a seat whose score is its coalition's sum bonds more, and the coalitions get about half again as large. COMMON PROBLEM moves at 6p (1.10 → 1.17).

  So the modes do reach decisions — the original claim that they are "scoring lenses over cooperative play" was too strong, and is withdrawn in favour of the sharper one: GROUND's scoring modes change who wins, not whether the group succeeds.

  Sensitivity: vary only the seat band and the effect appears and disappears — 2p shows no divergence in any mode, 4p shows the largest, 6p shows none under BONDED COALITIONS. A candidate explanation is that two relation slots per seat cap network growth, so at 6p the incentive exists and cannot be acted on; that is untested and is the next thing to vary.

  Still open, because the part that motivated it is untested: no policy models a rival playing their objective, so a competitive mode in which nobody anticipates an opponent remains a weak test of that mode (CB-WP-0049 "Not done here").

• F28 — SHARED GROUND's mastery rating counts cards where the mode card counts points. "All claimed Problem cards form one shared score. … For a mastery rating, subtract 1 for each Blame token still in play and 1 for each Denied Problem." The shared score is claimed value (total); mastery subtracts the same penalties from the claimed count. Both readings fit the sentence and they differ on every game where a 3-point Problem is claimed. Ours to report, theirs to rule.

  Sensitivity: vary only the point value of the claimed Problems and the gap moves with sum(value) - count. The two readings agree exactly when every claimed Problem is worth 1 — no Problem in the edition is — or when nothing is claimed, which is a loss. Everything else is held fixed: same board, same penalties, same threshold.

• F26 — a package that adds a FILE is invisible, where a package that adds a column is not. h2-scoped-problem-stress ships Rules_Text.csv — twenty-two passages of player-facing rules, including the one passage that says what a stress_scope does. No reader in clay-borg mentioned the file, so edition-check could not call it stale (a file nothing reads is not out of date, it is unseen) and no gate could call it unread. The rule the table's whole layout encodes sat in the repo, reachable by no player, for the entire measured life of H2.

  Inert rather than underdetermined: nothing is ambiguous about the rule and the engine implements it correctly — the text simply could not fire. Third instance of F18's shape and the first where the unit is a file, which is why it is filed separately instead of folded in.

  Raised against ground-game because the actionable half is theirs: a package's manifest should name its own files, so that a consumer reading none of them is a detectable state. clay-borg now reads the one passage it needed (CB-WP-0046); the other twenty-one remain unread and that is the standing evidence.

• F11 — SOLVE offered where it cannot act. Offered on a face-down Problem, or with no matching suit in hand; inert every time. Ruled GROUND-WP-0002 T02, implemented CB-WP-0023 as GR-P05. applied — the rule changed, not just the annotation. The case we reported was not the case that fired: validate already rejected face-down, and the maintainer's three inert SOLVEs were the hand case.

• F12 — GR-A13 "wasted SOLVE" on an already-claimed Problem. A scenario had to pick a default and did. note: no artifact isolates the degenerate line, so under GameDesign §3.1 it may not be reported until one exists.

• F13 — GR-E01 vs GR-S01, withdrawn 2026-08-05. Raised as "4/6/9 against 5/7/9, no dataset reconciles them." 2da19a4 measured 6/9/12 against 5/7/9 and the scenario was renamed -unreachable- → -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 5–6 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.

• F23 — a false claim propagated five times by citation instead of measurement. CB-EV-0024 §6 stated that chaos window 2 produced zero overrides and that its retirement condition was untestable. CB-EV-0025, CB-EV-0026, CB-EV-0027 and CB-WP-0029 each repeated it, citing the one before.

  It was false. Declaration 3 (CB-WP-0020) rolled d8 = 8 and overrode — and CB-WP-0020 recorded it correctly at the time, in those words: "the first override at d8… It changed nothing… One." Counting the workplans takes one command.

  The subject makes it worse. Three of those four files were arguing that this project's defect is claims asserted without their reproduction — while carrying one. facts-check catches a copied number that disagrees with its source; nothing catches a number with no source, asserted once and cited thereafter.

  applied — ADR-0017 corrects it, and each of the four files carries an in-place correction rather than a silent edit (ADR-0012 D5). The general defect is not fixed: it is the same family as the five wrong-subject instances, and still has no control.

• F22 — does the component supply bind the game? Asked, measured, and withdrawn. Tokens.csv gives every component a quantity — 6 Protection, 5 Denied, 12 relation links — and no numbered rule mentions a supply, so the engine could in principle mint a seventh Protection token (saturating_add, no bound, lib.rs:986). Measured over 750 games, 2–6 seats, greedy and random: Protection reaches 1 per seat and 2 on the table; Denied 3 of 5; links exactly 12 of 12, never over, because GR-L01's two-slot rule is the twelve-token supply written twice. Focus/Blame: 0 conflicts. Withdrawn — nothing to report. Registered as a stated negative because a survey that finds nothing and leaves no trace cannot be told from one that was never run. The check ships as a standing control (ADR-0016 D3): if play ever does exceed a quantity, that is a finding for ground-game — does the box bound the game, or do the rules? — and not a bound for the engine to invent.

• F21 — dragging did not work until after the first note was saved. Reported 2026-08-06: "I could not drag and drop at the beginning but after I added the first comment it worked." note, and I could not reproduce it. The gesture logic is correct against the served page (the JS harness posts properly), the ghost carries pointer-events:none so it cannot intercept the drop, and the markup is identical before and after the note — the 303 re-renders the same page from the same state. Candidates, none confirmed: a <details> toggle inside an action card shifting the layout mid-drag; a first-load timing difference; or a browser-level pointer capture. Reproducing it needs a browser, which no test here has — the same gap F19 named. Recorded rather than guessed at.

• F20 — a click target wearing a drag affordance made the ending controls look dead. play again, end session, pass and the move buttons carried .pick, which is cursor:grab. A grab cursor invites a drag, and a drag released over nothing posts nothing — so the button did nothing and appeared broken. Reported as two separate observations ("the button shows a hand to pick up that it probably shouldn't" and "I can't start another game or stop the server") which are one defect. applied: click targets now carry .tap. This extends CB-WP-0017's rule — interactive and inert must not look identical — to click and drag must not look identical either.

• F19 — the engine shipped a table nobody could play on, and every gate was green. CB-WP-0028's overhead view was 620px tall, so the action cards sat a screen below the Problems; dragging between them was physically impossible. Seats were drawn inside the table, and the table drop target was a card among the buttons rather than the drawn surface. make all passed throughout, because every test asserted the DOM was correct — which it was. The JS harness even posts a correct gesture against a page a human cannot drag on. degenerate: the feature fires and collapses play. applied — fixed 2026-08-06, with height, seat-position and single-drop-zone proxies added. They are proxies. Nothing here lays out a browser, and the gap CB-EV-0026 named — that no gate measures whether a player can play — is unclosed.

• F17 — ATTACK cannot affect whether the table succeeds. Reported from play as "there is no incentive to play attacks as long as I have positive cards", and the artifact now exists: games/ground/examples/attack-value.rs, 200 games per cell, one number varied — ATTACK's rank in an otherwise identical policy.

  ATTACK ranked	wins (2/3/4/5/6p)	attacks	DARVO armed
  10 (below all)	132 / 165 / 190 / 200 / 200	0	0
  75 (above SUPPORT)	132 / 165 / 190 / 200 / 200	315–923	13–218
  95 (above SOLVE)	0 / 0 / 0 / 0 / 0	1400–5170	400–1000

  The middle row is the finding: identical win counts at every seat count, while attacking hundreds of times and arming DARVO. Attacking is not punished — it is inert with respect to the goal. Group success is a function of SOLVE alone, and ATTACK only costs anything when it ranks above SOLVE and displaces it.

  So the maintainer was right and the reason is sharper than the phrasing. There is no incentive because there is no path: ATTACK's effects (Stress, Rivalry, DARVO) feed nothing that decides group_success.

  Asked in all three modes 2026-08-07, and ATTACK earns its place in none of them:

  mode	never attack	attack sometimes
  SHARED GROUND	132/165/190/200	identical — free but pointless
  COMMON PROBLEM	59/52/48/44	59/52/48/34 — a cost at six seats
  BONDED COALITIONS	131/134/132/116	59/52/48/34 — roughly halved

  The coalitions row has a mechanism the data confirms. GR-A07 flips a Bond to a Rivalry on Attack, and GR-E04 scores Bond networks — so attacking destroys the thing that scores. And the attacking numbers in E04 are identical to E03's, which is exactly what that predicts: break every Bond and each seat becomes a coalition of one, so GR-E04 degenerates into GR-E03.

  Not a claim that the game is broken. DARVO is the pattern the game is about not falling into; a self-destructive ATTACK may be the design. The question for ground-game is whether the namesake mechanic being unreachable in competent co-op play is intended.

• F18 — the engine imports one of nineteen edition files, so the cards cannot say what they do. Reported as "I don't understand the GROUND card" — which is not a design gap: Actions.csv carries that card's tagline ("Regulate. Restore the frame. Decide.") and full rules text, and clay-borg never imported it. Every other card is the same: a player sees Clarify where the card reads "Ask What Happened — Invite a concrete account before judging." inert: the data exists and cannot fire, because nothing reads it. Ours, and CB-WP-0028 fixes it.

• F25 — the engine hardcodes numbers the edition states. GroundState::threshold is a match returning 5/7/9 while Scenarios.csv carries threshold_2_players, threshold_3_4_players and threshold_5_6_players; setup writes stress: 2 against "All players start at Stress 2."; the engine plays five rounds against a printed 1–5 track. All three agree, on all four scenarios, and that is the finding rather than the reassurance: these are the most contested numbers in the project — the whole 4/6/9 versus 5/7/9 episode turned on them — and the engine has been right by maintenance coincidence rather than by reading the file that owns them. inert, role default: green because they agree, red the moment either side moves. Ours. Same shape as F24.

• F24 — the draw pile is a Rust literal. solution_deck() builds six of each suit from an array and never opens Solutions.csv, whose suit and quantity columns say the same thing. They agree today — 24 rows, six per suit — so nothing is wrong now, and that is the point: the engine is right by maintenance coincidence rather than by reading. inert: the data exists and cannot fire. Role default, not counterexample — the reproduction is green because the two agree, which is the state GameDesign §1.3 says to expect from a documented provisional choice, and it turns red the moment either side moves. Ours. CB-WP-0037 T02 deletes the literal.

• 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 says nothing about how several games combine. CB-WP-0024 T04 shows both, labelled, rather than picking one and letting it become the score by default. note: no artifact demonstrates that this harms play — a unit test showing the two tallies point at different seats demonstrates only that they can differ, which is arithmetic, not a design defect. Under GameDesign §3.1 it may not be reported until one exists.

• F14 — GR-E03/GR-E04 never played to the end. Closed 2026-08-07, and the reason they were unplayed was ours. cb-play built every game with ScoringMode::SharedGround and passed an empty patch, so two of the three shipped modes were unreachable from the only way anyone plays. The mode was patchable in scenarios and not from the driver. --mode added; all three now play to the end and give different winners from identical play: shared → all four seats, common → P3 alone, coalitions → P1+P2. applied — 800 games per mode in the reproduction.

The register's first run found ten answers nobody had collected

U1–U10 are ruled, not reported. GROUND-WP-0002 T05 answered all ten on 2026-08-03 — every one confirmed as the default clay-borg already simulates — and GROUND-WP-0002 T03 confirmed five of the six provisional scenarios, voiding gr-e01 as a rules gap. The workplan is finished.

CB-RES-0007 reported "0 of 10 ruled" and this register was built saying reported. Both were two days stale on the day they were written. The answers had arrived and nothing propagated them — the same failure as the unread inbox, in the opposite direction.

They are ruled, not applied, and the difference is work we owe. Per ADR-0012 D5, applied means the source changed and the provisional default was deleted. The rulings confirmed our defaults, so the rules did not move — but the scenarios still carry provisional: true for choices that are now settled. Lifting those flags and recording each ruling is what closes U1–U10, and it is not done. make design shows them open until it is.

The U-item ↔ scenario mapping, measured twice

One U-item has a scenario that names it: U2. CB-RES-0007 asserted six of ten did.

CB-WP-0026 T03 tried to write the other mappings and produced two wrong ones before checking them:

claimed	why it was withdrawn
gr-a04-bond-support → U1	it asserts consent is required; U1 asks when the target accepts. Different question.
gr-d05-darvo-reverse → U5	it exercises the unrejected REVERSE; U5 is the rejected one (GROUND—ND). Different stage.

Both were plausible from the covers: list and both were wrong on reading the description. That is the third and fourth instance of this exact defect — a link that looks right, asserted without checking what the artifact actually exercises — and the first two reached ground-game.

So a scenario now declares encodes_u_item explicitly or claims nothing. Nine U-items have no reproduction and are recorded as having none. They are applied because the ruling landed and the provisional flag came off, not because anything demonstrates them.

What the backfill measured, and what it contradicted

Only U2 names its U-item in a scenario. Measured, not estimated:

for u in U1 .. U10; do grep -lE "\b$u\b" scenarios/ground/*.yaml; done

CB-RES-0007 asserted "six of the ten already have provisional scenarios." Five provisional scenarios exist and one cites the item it stands for. The other four may well encode U-item defaults — the mapping is simply not written down, so it is not checkable, and an uncheckable link is the defect this register exists to fix. The register records what is citable; the rest is debt, visible in make design.

No sixth kind was needed — the five kinds absorbed all four non-U findings. And the survey's "six provisional defaults" was not entered as a finding: C3 showed it double-counted GR-E01, and the provisional scenarios are reproductions for underdetermined items, not a finding of their own.

U1–U10 are reported while lacking reproductions, which GameDesign §3.1 would now forbid. They were reported on 2026-07-30, before the rule existed. They are grandfathered rather than rewritten, and the debt is a reported metric with a target of zero.