The depth-7 opening is not the worst case: a mid-game decision overran two hours
The first depth-7 gauntlet-01 attempt reached move 9 and then exceeded the policy's two-hour per-decision budget on a half-full board, more than three times the measured opening cost. The per-decision limit is now four hours, still an unverified guess rather than a measurement, and the crash journal retained all eight completed moves so the game resumes rather than restarting.
A mid-game depth-7 decision cost more than three times the opening
Yesterday's depth-7 work ended with a measured opening decision — 2302 s at 0.983 worker occupancy — and a two-hour per-decision budget sized with what looked like threefold headroom. Playing the same policy through gauntlet-01 disproved that sizing at move 9.
The depth-7 opening decision is not representative of the game
mid-game decision exceeded 7200 s, opening cost 2302 srust-fair-d7-s7 completed eight moves of gauntlet-01 and was then killed by
its own budget on the ninth: board
0000000000000000000000002000000670084989098888898 (three occupied rows and
part of a fourth, several covered discs, most columns still open) did not
answer within 7200 s under the frontier scheduler at D7/S7 with a
16,777,216-entry cache. That is at least 3.1x the measured opening cell, and
it is a lower bound only — the process was terminated, so the position's true
cost remains unknown. The opening position is therefore a poor basis for
estimating a full depth-7 game, and yesterday's "order of a day and a half"
figure should be read as a floor rather than an estimate. Record:
runs/RUN-20260828T0700Z-d7-midgame-timeout/.
The budget was raised to four hours. This is an operational guess, not a measurement: nothing has yet established what the expensive mid-game positions actually cost at depth 7, only that at least one exceeds two hours. Whether four hours is enough for this position, let alone for the fuller boards that follow it, is open.
Crash-safety held: the overrun cost one decision, not eight
8 of 8 completed moves retainedThe overrun surfaced as the harness's own budget error rather than a raw
spawnSync ETIMEDOUT, which is deliberately not treated as a checkpoint
mismatch, so the move journal survived intact with all eight completed moves
(score 17106 at move 8). Rerunning the same command replays those moves
through the engine with per-move board and score verification and retries
only the position that failed. Journal snapshot:
runs/RUN-20260828T0700Z-d7-midgame-timeout/checkpoint-at-failure.jsonl.
Scripted-round results remain playground demonstrations, never tier evidence; no research seed range was touched.
A log entry is a narrative written by the contributors listed above. Run validity, scientific outcome and evidence tier live with the experiment and result records the entry refers to.