pilot.py gained SYLPH_PREFER, a unit-name substring whose matches get their
target score multiplied by 0.05 while everything else is multiplied by 4.0. With
SYLPH_PREFER=e010 a clean 320 s run, zero stalls by the witness, killed eight
turrets and two Attacker_S.
The preference is real -- e010 kills went from roughly one across all previous
runs to two in a single run -- but it is weak. Turrets still outnumber attackers
four to one in the kill log, because target commitment and simple proximity keep
pulling the nose back to them, and phase 1 fields 108 turret craft against 16
attackers. Deployed stayed at 41 throughout, so no phase advance.
That quantifies the blocker. Clearing the marked attackers means destroying 16
craft, and at two per 320 s that is about 2560 seconds, roughly 43 minutes of
continuous verified-live flight across many chained attaches, against a freeze
rate of about two runs in five.
This is no longer a reverse-engineering problem. Everything needed to observe
the phase advance is built and validated -- the roster-to-craft link, the
liveness read, the stall witness, chained attaches and the discard rule. What is
missing is a pilot good enough to complete the mission objective, which is
game-playing work with an uncertain payoff.
The choice is recorded rather than made, because it is about how much effort one
confirmation is worth rather than a technical unknown: invest in the pilot,
accept the static answer where only the trigger is inferred rather than
observed, or attempt one very long chained run betting against the freeze rate.
The previous iteration declared route entries t=210 and t=240 unreachable
because a shell call is capped at 595 s. That was wrong, and it rested on an
assumption I never checked: launch_mission.sh leaves the emulator running and it
survives between Bash calls within a turn. Verified directly -- 611 s elapsed
and still running after the launching call had returned.
attach_session.sh attaches a pilot and probe to an already-running mission, and
attaches chain, so the window is bounded by the turn rather than by one call.
On one continuous mission: 300 s of clean observation followed by an attach that
ran 135 s before freezing, giving 435 s of cumulative verified-live wall-clock.
The craft population fell from 300 to 258, so 42 were destroyed, and deployed
fell 41 to 38. Zero confirmed arrivals throughout -- the longest verified-live
observation so far. That covers the first four phase-1 route entries, t=90, 120,
170 and 210; t=240 needs 436 s and was missed by a second.
The coverage claim is qualified rather than asserted. The wall-to-game
conversion uses 55 %, from a 16.5/s frame rate against an assumed 30 Hz tick,
but the witness has measured 8, 11, 11, 21 and 24 per second across runs. At the
low end the factor is 0.27 and the same 435 s covers only about 117
game-seconds, reaching t=90 alone. So what is established is that nothing
arrived in 435 s of verified-live phase-1 flight with 42 kills; how many
scheduled arrival times that spans depends on a tick rate that is not yet
pinned, and pinning it is what would make the result sharp.
Also refuted: SYLPH_HZ=3, a lower pilot poll rate, produced the lowest
calibrated frame rate of any run at 8/s while landing the most kills at 26. The
pilot's polling is not the throttle and lowering it does not buy game time.
Two harness problems, one fixed and verified, one diagnosed.
Bind: three consecutive attempts failed and the session aborted rather than
flying an unattended craft, which is last iteration's guard working as intended.
The cause is that entities2 self finds the player by motion between two samples,
so a craft sitting still at mission start is invisible. The session now holds the
throttle for three seconds before each attempt. Verified: the next run bound
immediately and produced 11 losses with zero confirmed arrivals, making fourteen
runs without one. One increase, 10 to 11, was surfaced and correctly not counted.
Witness: the frame-rate-band selection is still unreliable. It found only five
candidates in band and reported 0 of 5 moved in samples where craft were being
destroyed, and a counter genuinely running at 24/s cannot fail to advance across
a 15 s sample -- it would gain about 360. They are bursty counters that moved
during the 3 s calibration and then stopped.
The cause is mine. When the witness was bolted into wave7_probe the candidate
search was narrowed to a 4 MB window, while timer_probe searched the whole 32 MB
region and found 286 candidates with a clean cluster near 17/s. The narrowing
was never justified, it was just cheaper to write. Now searches the full region
once at startup, which is a one-off cost rather than per sample, and warns
explicitly when fewer than eight witnesses are available so a weak vote is
visible instead of silently trusted. Not yet run.
Worth recording: this is the third attempt at this witness, and all three
failures share one pattern -- a shortcut in selecting the witness rather than in
the voting logic. Each was caught only because the flagged samples contradicted
the loss events in the same output. That internal contradiction is the real
check and should survive into any future version.
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.
The control needed no new decoding: hunting pilot, keep-out 1400, 300 s, and no
memory probe at all, judged only from the pilot's own log. It ran healthy the
whole way -- 211, 257, 250, 241 and 200 distinct speed values in successive 60 s
windows, with no decline in the last one -- against probed runs that stalled at
roughly 27, 83 and 255 s and ended with a single distinct speed across 400 lines.
So the instrument was degrading the thing it measured. AGENT.md warned that a
full scan competes with the emulator for every core under lavapipe, and the
probes grew heavier each iteration until wave6 was reading the entire 32 MB
entity heap plus about 300 extra preads every 12 seconds while the game
rendered.
The control is n=1. The contrast is stark and the mechanism was predicted in
advance, so this is recorded as confirmed enough to act on rather than proven; a
second clean control would settle it.
What it costs is worth stating plainly. Every "no arrival" result so far was
collected while the probe was running, under conditions the game was struggling
with and in some runs after it had frozen. That does not make them wrong -- the
elimination test at t=163 s sits in a window the witness later showed was live --
but none of them is as strong as written, and the arrival question deserves
re-running with cheap sampling before silence is read as evidence.
wave7_probe.py is the fix: one full enumeration, then polling only the hull word
at each known craft base, about 1.2 KB per sample instead of 32 MB, with a full
rescan every 90 s to catch anything genuinely new. Three or four heavy scans per
run instead of twenty-five. Implemented but not yet run, so the claim that it
stops the stalling is untested and the next run must report the witness first.
