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

id	kind	title	status
CB-WP-0023	product	SOLVE is offered only where it can do something	active

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: todo
priority: high

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.

Task: retire what the ruling settles

id: CB-WP-0023-T02
status: todo
priority: medium

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.

Task: evidence

id: CB-WP-0023-T03
status: todo
priority: high

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.