tegwick
a928b5925c
ground-game packages hypotheses as selectable rules variants — a catalog, a rules_delta.yaml, and prose — and their note is explicit that CSV text alone is not executable here. So the kernel gains a Variant in game state: in the state, therefore in the hash, therefore in the recording, because a scenario replayed under a different variant would diverge silently. Baseline is bit-for-bit what it was, asserted across seat counts and seeds. A variant system that perturbs the baseline invalidates every measurement this repo has. H1-A and H1-B implemented from rules_delta.yaml and mutation-proven on their own defects: "unclaimed" misread as face-up-and-unsolved, and the attacker's Stress read after the attack's effects. Their `unchanged:` list is asserted rather than trusted — that list is their claim about their own experiment. Measured, and three of their four criteria fail. DARVO arm rate is still 0 under greedy; ATTACK selection does not rise and falls for the rank-75 policy; group success collapses from 165/190/200 to 0 at 3/4/6 seats. The mechanism is not the assumed one: greedy answers the pressure by regulating, Stress plateaus at 3, so it never reaches the gate at 4 or the arm at 5 — H1-A acts as a solve-rate tax and H1-B is unreachable under competent play. A harness defect was caught before the claim: sweep discarded refused games silently and never reported its count, so "nobody won" and "nothing played" printed identically. Reporting H1 as unwinnable on that basis would have been the ADR-0018 family aimed at another repo's design. All 200 games ran in every cell; the zeros are real. Chaos d8 = 8 — the window's first override, redrew L against a structural L, so it changed nothing. Window 3 recorded in ChaosRollHistory. NOT REVIEWED: tier L owes a separate-agent adversarial review, and no H1 result may reach ground-game until it has run. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
5.1 KiB
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-gameuntil 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.
1. The result, against their own criteria
ground-game's success criteria (design note §3.2), answered one by one.
Three of four fail.
| # | criterion | verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DARVO arm rate non-trivial, "not 0/500" | fails — still 0 under greedy at every seat count |
| 2 | ATTACK selection rises for some subpopulation | fails — greedy still attacks 0 times; and for the rank-75 policy ATTACK fell, 604 → 180 at 2p |
| 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.