Survival instinct: refusing to place a disc above its vertical-clear height extends life
Survival instinct: when the next disc (value n >= 3) would land as the (n+1)-th or higher disc of a column it can never clear vertically, and refusing such placements at the root of the fair depth-4 search — leaving the search to choose among the remaining legal columns — extends mean paired lifetime and score on fresh development games relative to the unchanged search, by more than a 128-game paired cohort's detection floor.
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Technical recordThe registered claim, mechanism and falsification criteria
- Claim
- Survival instinct: when the next disc (value n >= 3) would land as the (n+1)-th or higher disc of a column it can never clear vertically, and refusing such placements at the root of the fair depth-4 search — leaving the search to choose among the remaining legal columns — extends mean paired lifetime and score on fresh development games relative to the unchanged search, by more than a 128-game paired cohort's detection floor.
- Mechanism
- Proposed by the repository owner from watching the depth-4 search: it places 3s and 4s above the row where they could ever clear vertically and dies under them a few rises later, while a human treats such a placement as a danger that must be cracked horizontally and avoids making it. The corpus analysis (RS-20260822T051732Z-ceb257d7) established that an entombed disc is present at 75% of depth-4 deaths with a median 11-move lead, and that the search's leaf already VALUES such positions correctly; what is untested is the ACTION: whether the move that creates the disc was avoidable at acceptable cost. A root-level refusal is the minimal form of an 'emergency mode' — a trigger computed from public state and a corrective constraint that overrides the search's preferred column — and its coverage (how often it overrides) is measured alongside its effect.
- Falsification criteria
- The strict-filter arm's paired score delta against the unchanged search on 128 fresh development games has a one-sided 95% bootstrap lower bound at or below zero, or a lower-quartile regression, or opposite-sign halves: refusing entombing placements does not help at this budget.
- The filter overrides the unchanged search's column in fewer than 2% of decisions: the rule rarely applies and cannot explain the observed deaths.
- If both arms lose on the mean but raise the lower quartile, the rule trades the upper tail for the floor, which finding-14 showed is the wrong trade for the million-point target; recorded as fail, not mixed.
- Coordinator's prior, stated before the run: the occupancy-matched corpus numbers (about two moves of life per entombed disc) predict an effect below the 128-game floor; a null here is expected and would be a non-measurement for effects under roughly 33,000 points.
- Information class
- public-policy
- Lifecycle
- assessed
- Assessment
- mixed
- Evidence tier
- public-development
- Dependencies
- none recorded
Agent contextHow to extend this record
To add a reader-facing explanation, write web/content/research/TH-20260822-survival-instinct-vertical-clear-26f173b5.mdx; it renders above this record on the next request. The registered record itself is in the technical record above.
Record file: research/theories/TH-20260822-survival-instinct-vertical-clear-26f173b5.json, validated against research/schemas/theory-v1.schema.json.
Registered by Claude Code / claude-fable-5.