ResultContinued whole-game evolution of the depth-5-distilled NNUE leaf from the first run's generation-60 population, with annealed mutation and a preregistered plateau stop (up to 1,000 generations)

Valid run of the frozen protocol EX-20260903-nnue-evolution-continuation-d3-f8ce9181 (successor to RS-20260903T025751Z-6577b33e), every stage completed, every artifact with zero illegal and zero incomplete decisions. Stage C resumed from the first run's checkpointed generation-60 population (SHA-256 3da5021531898f08254d35cad5486fbbc12092770216bcdaea988d3724422cb8) with the first run's frozen candidate (SHA-256 edd0d2efd181de43f35d62c4df784cb2c789db3ae296be93a1c6c59082034a9f) as a third paired control and an annealed mutation size (sigma_rel from 0.05, time constant 400 generations, floor 0.01; it reached 0.0345 at the last generation). The preregistered plateau rule stopped the run after generation 149: the first check after generation 99 found the paired margin over the fair control rising at +238.6 points per generation (standard error 127.1, one-sided 95% lower bound +29.6) and continued; the second, after generation 149, found +37.3 per generation (standard error 119.3, lower bound -158.9), no detectable improvement over generations 50-149, and stopped. Fifty-generation averages of the population mean: 204,748, 228,706, 237,946; paired margin over the first run's candidate +8,982, +36,076, +45,613; over the fair control -116,503, -99,833, -88,948. The best candidate beat the fair control on 9 of 150 blocks (generations 59, 66, 73, 97, 100, 109, 115, 125, 137); the population mean beat it on none, so the theory's training-signal falsifier fails again (mean above fair in 0 of the last 10, margin -98,026). Elite re-selection on 128 fresh games (0xa52e32c0) froze candidate-12 at 264,466 (finalists 228,212 to 264,466). Stage D, 64 never-read games (0xa52ea000, opened once at 2026-09-03T16:21:00Z after the candidate's SHA-256 was recorded), five arms: the continued candidate averaged 251,667 against the frozen fair leaf's 320,108 at the identical depth-3 configuration, paired -68,441 (bootstrap 95% bounds -112,090 to -26,694, Student-t lower bound -112,274, floor 43,193), W-T-L 25-0-39, halves -112,383 / -24,500, lower quartile 171,440 against 189,414: every screen criterion fails, scientific outcome fail for this configuration. The preregistered secondary contrast answers the continuation's own question: the continued candidate beat the first run's frozen candidate on the same seeds by +36,278 (bootstrap lower bound +9,085, Student-t lower bound +8,543, floor 27,330, W-T-L 41-0-23, halves -7,140 / +79,697), so 150 further generations improved the leaf out of sample, by about a third of the remaining distance. The first run's candidate reproduced its earlier result on fresh seeds: -104,719 against the fair leaf here (lower bound -143,479) against -106,964 on the first screen. Over the warm start the continued candidate is +107,994 (lower bound +82,769, W-T-L 54-0-10). The reference arm gave fair depth 4 over fair depth 3 +71,799 (lower bound +25,857). Read: whole-game evolution keeps improving the leaf until roughly generation 100 of the continuation and then levels off about 70,000 paired points short of the frozen fair leaf on held-out games; the claim is not supported at this budget, and the plateau is the new fact. Whether the levelling is a property of the leaf class or of the annealed step size cannot be separated in this design.