Run 12, cheap probe with a bound pilot: 16 losses over 290 s and zero confirmed
arrivals, making twelve runs without one. The persistence rule earned its place
immediately -- an increase of 13 to 15 was surfaced and correctly not counted,
since it does not start from zero. Under the previous rule it would have been
invisible, and a similar flicker straddling zero was nearly written up last
iteration as the first arrival.
The stall witness, on the other hand, is unreliable. Thirteen samples were
flagged GUEST STALLED while recording losses in those same samples, and a frozen
guest cannot destroy craft, so they are false positives and the run was healthy.
The cause is the selection rule: it took the first word in a 4 MB window whose
rate fell in a plausible band, and plenty of counters advance intermittently
without saying anything about whether frames are being rendered. timer_probe had
already solved this properly -- 286 candidates, a rate histogram with a dominant
cluster near 17/s -- and that lesson was not carried over when the witness was
bolted onto the probe.
Now fixed to a majority vote: collect every candidate, keep the modal-rate
cluster, sample up to 32 of them, and report a stall only when fewer than half
advance. It also prints RUN UNVALIDATED when no witness is found, because an
earlier run printed "stalled samples=0" alongside "tick witness: NONE", and a
witness that does not exist cannot report zero stalls. Not yet run.
Consequence worth flagging: the "0 stalled samples" that validated the cheap
probe last iteration came from this same unreliable witness and should be
re-confirmed under the majority rule. The pilot-log speed analysis that
established the stalls in the first place is unaffected.
Also fixed: the entity bind now retries three times and aborts if it never
takes, instead of silently flying an unattended craft -- one run was wasted that
way this iteration, producing no kills and no information.
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