ResultDepth-5-distilled NNUE leaf refined by paired-fitness whole-game evolution inside the depth-3 fair search (v2: operational parameters fixed in the record body)

Valid run of the frozen protocol EX-20260902-nnue-evolution-d3-v2-49c18bc2 on the whole workstation (32 threads), every stage completed, every artifact with zero illegal and zero incomplete decisions. Stage A: the depth-5 seven-stratum teacher played 177 complete games (21,618 sibling-complete labelled roots, 3 stopped at the 500-move cap) before the 46,800 s new-game cutoff; the teacher ran 77.5 s per root, four to seven times slower than the pilot projected, so the corpus is about a third of the 512 games the protocol allowed for. Stage B: the supervised warm start reached validation Huber 0.6873 rise units at epoch 8 of 16 on a whole-origin split (17,641/3,977 roots), and the deployment-faithful ordering probe put the depth-3 search with that leaf at top-1 agreement 0.4414 with the teacher on 256 held-out roots (mean teacher-value regret 2,395 points). Stage C: 60 generations of the mutation-only GA (population 32, 32 paired games per candidate per fresh block, fair-d3s7 and warm-start controls on every block). The population separated steadily from its warm start - ten-generation paired mean margins over the init control of +4,682, +15,853, +22,704, +32,278, +34,037, +40,431 points, best candidate +76,679 in the last block - but never approached the fair control: the population mean was above the fair leaf in 0 of the final 10 generations and the best candidate in 0 (mean margin -121,896), so the theory's training-signal falsifier fails. Elite re-selection on 128 fresh games froze candidate-29 at 202,237 (finalists spanned 187,352 to 202,237). Stage D: on the 64 never-read held-out games (0xa52e1300, opened once at 2026-09-03T02:41:29Z after the candidate's SHA-256 was recorded), the evolved candidate averaged 190,961 against the frozen fair leaf's 297,926 at the identical depth-3 configuration: paired delta -106,964 (bootstrap 95% bounds -146,580 to -69,983, Student-t lower bound -145,890, detection floor 38,357), W-T-L 14-0-50, both halves negative (-109,139 / -104,790), lower quartile 122,253 against 158,387. Every preregistered pass criterion except artifact integrity and candidate identity fails: scientific outcome fail for this exact configuration. The ablation arm shows what evolution did contribute: the unevolved warm start averaged 155,586 (-142,340 against the fair leaf), and the evolved candidate beat it on the same seeds by +35,375 (bootstrap lower bound +16,899, floor 18,949, W-T-L 36-0-28, both halves positive). Whole-game evolution with common random numbers therefore moves a 572k-weight leaf on the deployed objective, which the first (CMA-ES) leaf evolution could not show; it moved it about a quarter of the way from a warm start that plays at half the fair leaf's level. The reference arm reproduced the program's standing result: fair depth 4 over fair depth 3 +97,059 (lower bound +29,330). Read: the claim is not supported as tested; the mechanism's evolutionary leg is supported, its distillation leg is the weak link (a warm start that holds the teacher's values but not its ordering), and the budget (177 teacher games, 60 generations) was too small for evolution to cover the distance.