3be3628468
The incremental-save fix is verified. A fresh mission caught one e010 event at t=241 s and wrote 1187 candidates to disk immediately; the turn timeout then fired exactly as before, but this time the data survived. The session also clears the candidate file at launch, since candidate offsets are only meaningful within one emulator instance and resuming across launches would intersect unrelated addresses. The correlation itself was wrong though. It matched on the delta alone, so any two float bit patterns whose integer representations differ by the loss count qualified, and in a heap full of positions and velocities that is thousands of words. The 1187 survivors were things like 1044450858, about 0.1f, and 3212461993, a negative float. Candidates must now also look like a counter -- a small non-negative integer in both samples -- which removes the noise by construction instead of hoping the intersection washes it out. The follow-up attach logged zero events across 520 s, which reads like the combat-effectiveness limit again. It was not: 25 of its 26 samples were flagged GUEST STALLED, so the guest was frozen for essentially the whole window. The witness added last iteration did its job, and the lesson is about reading it -- the run summary quoted "0 events" first and the stall count only surfaced on a deliberate check. A run's witness result should be the first thing looked at, before any interpretation of what the run showed. Still unfinished, with no address identified. What is needed is unchanged, two or three e010 kill events in non-stalled samples, and the two obstacles are now clearly separate: the freeze rate, and a pilot that manages about two marked-fighter kills per five minutes.
4.8 KiB
Hunting REMAINING OB by correlation — method works, run did not finish
Status: ✅ the correlation method is sound and demonstrated; 🔴 the hunt is unfinished; 🔴 two self-inflicted defects, one a repeat.
The method
mission-phase-objectives.md settles what the
counter is: Stage 02 phase 1 asks to "shoot down all invading enemy fighters"
and the hints say red [OB] markers indicate the targets. So REMAINING OB
must fall when a marked fighter dies — and the per-record craft strength already
says exactly when that happens, for a named unit.
So instead of scanning for a value, intersect: keep every word in the 32 MB heap
that fell by the same amount, in the same interval, as an e010 loss. Each kill
event should cut the survivor set hard.
tools/re-capture/ob_probe2.py.
✅ It works — one event cut 8 million words to 1056
t= 219s e010 losses=2 (all=4) words falling by 2: 1056 -> candidates 1056
From ~8 M candidate words to 1056 on a single event. Two or three more should leave a handful.
🔴 The run did not finish, and the candidates were lost
The turn's timeout fired at t = 219 s, and the probe saved its candidate set only at the end — so the 1056 were discarded. The follow-up attach then started from nothing.
This is the same mistake already recorded in guest-stalls.md: "the first attempt deferred all analysis to the end of the run, and the turn's timeout killed it with 240 s of collected data still in memory and nothing written." I wrote that lesson down and then repeated it in a new script four iterations later.
Fixed: candidates are now written to /tmp/ob_candidates.json after every
event, and SYLPH_OB_RESUME=1 loads them so a chained attach keeps
intersecting on the same mission.
🔴 The attach could not tell a quiet mission from a frozen one
The follow-up attach logged 535 s with zero losses of any kind. That is
exactly what a freeze looks like, and ob_probe2 had no stall witness, so the
run cannot say which it was. Also fixed — the witness from wave7_probe is now
carried here.
Two defects in one iteration, both of them things this corpus had already learned. The pattern is that each new probe starts from scratch and re-earns the same lessons; the fix that would actually stick is a shared probe harness rather than a family of one-off scripts.
What is still open
The hunt itself. The method is demonstrated but no address is identified. What it
needs is a run that catches two or three e010 kill events, which is the same
combat-effectiveness limit recorded in
mission-objectives-text.md — the preference knob
gets about two marked-fighter kills per five minutes against a dozen turrets.
Second attempt: saving works, the filter was wrong (2026-08-24)
✅ Incremental saving works
A fresh mission caught one e010 event at t = 241 s and wrote 1187 candidates
to disk immediately. The turn timeout then fired, exactly as before — but this
time the data survived it. The fix from the previous iteration is verified.
The session also now clears /tmp/ob_candidates.json at launch: candidate
offsets are only meaningful within one emulator instance, so resuming across
launches would intersect unrelated addresses.
🔴 The correlation had no value filter, and the survivors were floats
The 1187 survivors are not counters:
va 0xbd0a42b8 value 1044450858 (~0.1f)
va 0xbd140bc0 value 3200164558 (a negative float)
va 0xbd14a120 value 3212461993
The filter matched on the delta alone, so any two float bit patterns whose
integer representations differ by exactly lost qualified. In a 32 MB heap full
of positions and velocities that is thousands of words.
Fixed: candidates must also look like a counter — a small non-negative integer
(0 ≤ v < 1000) in both samples. That removes float noise by construction rather
than hoping the intersection washes it out.
🔴 The attach was frozen, and the witness said so
The follow-up attach logged 0 events across 520 s, which reads like the
combat-effectiveness limit again. It was not: 25 of its 26 samples were flagged
GUEST STALLED. The guest was frozen for essentially the whole window.
The witness added last iteration did its job. The lesson is about reading it — the run summary quoted "0 events" first and the stall count only turned up on a deliberate check. A run's witness result should be the first thing looked at, before any interpretation of what the run "showed".
Still unfinished
No address identified. What is needed is unchanged — two or three e010 kill
events in non-stalled samples — and the two obstacles are now clearly separate:
the freeze rate, and the pilot managing roughly two marked-fighter kills per five
minutes.