--- id: GROUND-RPT-0007 type: report title: "clay-borg: correction — H1-B was never measured, and it does something" domain: consumer repo: ground-game status: informational owner: bernd topic_slug: whynot created: "2026-08-09" extends: GROUND-WP-0006 --- # Correction to GROUND-RPT-0004 (H1 measured) Upstream: clay-borg `specs/FindingRegister.md` F31, `games/ground/examples/module-panel.rs`. **This is a correction we owe you, not a new result we chose to send.** --- ## 1. What we got wrong We reported H1 as measured and rejected. **Half of it was never measured.** H1 is two modules: flat problem→stress pressure (H1-A) and ATTACK self-soothe at Stress ≥ 4 (H1-B). Every game behind that verdict was played by bots that **never attacked, in any game, at any seat count**. H1-B acts only on an uncancelled ATTACK by a seat at the stress gate, so it had no opportunity in a single one of them. **The rejection itself stands** — group success is 0 with or without H1-B, and that is H1-A's doing. But *"H1-B does nothing"* was never established, and is now known to be false. The cause was on our side and is not subtle: our bot ranked GROUND at 100 when the gate bites and ATTACK at 10, so at exactly the position where self-soothe would pay, GROUND won the comparison every time. --- ## 2. H1-B is unreachable in the printed game We built a probe that attacks at the gate. **Selected on its own, `attack_relief.self_soothe_ge4` still never fires.** Peak Stress in the baseline never exceeds its starting 2. The gate is at 4. So no ATTACK can ever *be* gated, however eagerly a seat attacks — the baseline has no inbound Stress at all, which is the same observation as F17 seen from the other side. **A module can be unreachable because of an aspect it does not name.** `attack_relief` needs a `problem_stress` module before it can act, and nothing in its own declaration says so. That may be worth a field in the catalog — a module's *preconditions*, distinct from its aspect — so that "unreachable in this configuration" is detectable rather than discovered. --- ## 3. Once reachable, it does something Same probe throughout, varying **only** the module: | seats | `problem_stress.scoped` | `+ attack_relief.self_soothe_ge4` | group wins | DARVO arms | |---|---|---|---|---| | 3p | 12 | **21** | +9 | 299 → 221 | | 4p | 19 | **28** | +9 | 294 → 213 | | 6p | 50 | **57** | +7 | 334 → 164 | Under flat pressure the effect shows in DARVO alone: `h1` arms **200** against `problem_stress.flat_any_open`'s 300 / 400 / 600, with group wins 0 in both. **Read this as the conditional it is.** *Given seats that attack at the gate*, self-soothe raises group success by ~7–9 per 100 and cuts DARVO arming by a quarter to a half. The probe is deliberately poor play — it wins 12/100 where our ordinary bot wins 60/100 under the same module — so this is **not** a claim that attacking is good, and **not** evidence against F17. **Sensitivity:** vary only the ATTACK rank. At 10 and at +55 the module never fires; at 110 it fires in every game. Nothing about the module changed — only whether any seat gave it a turn. --- ## 4. What we are not saying - **Not** that H1 should be reconsidered. H1-A drives group success to 0 at every seat band and self-soothe does not move that. - **Not** that ATTACK is good play. - **Not** that these numbers describe a table. Every one is bots, and the seats that produce them play badly on purpose. **Ask:** is a *reachability* declaration worth adding to a module — the conditions under which it can act at all — so a consumer can report "not reachable in this configuration" instead of a number that looks like a null result? --- ## 5. Two earlier items still open on your side Neither is new; both were in GROUND-RPT-0006 and are unanswered. **(a) The competitive modes are weakly tested.** No bot of ours models a *rival* playing their objective. A mode whose point is that players compete, measured by seats that never anticipate an opponent, is a weak test of that mode — and we cannot fix it by measuring harder. **(b) `problem_stress.scoped` cannot reach a decision in round one.** Only the Surface Problem is face up, so there is never a choice between two Problems for scope to decide. Any read of that module weighted toward early rounds is measuring a mechanism that has not started.