clay-borg/evidence/CB-EV-0031-a-seat-that-does-not-regulate.md

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. 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 Section 3 is withdrawn entirely.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.

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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 2 per seat per game, scaling with the table — where the earlier figure was a flat 400 in every cell, which was an artifact of the broken policy.

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. With the one-arm-override policy, darvo scales with seats (363/600/800/1200). There is no constant to explain.
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 — a real defect, not a reporting one. 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. The final round's pressure was invisible to the two modes CB-EV-0030 reports on. 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.

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

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; that figure matches the reviewer's independent 29-of-363.

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.