The Test

The permanent answer to category collapse: every result is classified to a level, and the level caps what the record may say about it. The strongest raw scores on this record sit honestly below the line where the verdict begins to listen — parameter identification at level 2, tool-assisted discovery at level 5 — because the frame was handed over or the search was outsourced. The line is crossed by construction, not by score.

1. L0 Recall The answer is recovered from prior exposure.
2. L1 Interpolation The system recombines familiar structures.
3. L2 Parameter identification The frame is given; unknown values are solved.
4. L3 Rule induction A transformation is inferred from examples.
5. L4 Model selection The system chooses among candidate frames it was shown.
6. L5 Tool-assisted discovery External tools perform substantial search or regression.
7. L6 Scaffolded frame proposal A frame is proposed after structural hints.
8. L7 Unscaffolded frame construction The governing ontology is generated without being handed over.
9. L8 Transferable frame construction The constructed frame generalizes across structurally different domains.
10. L9 Scientific-grade discovery The frame survives independent expert review and reality over time.

Pre-registered before it is needed, so the moment of passage — or its refusal — cannot be gamed by the instrument itself. All gates are required; by precedent, any one alone is an anecdote. Since protocol v3 every gate is mechanical: reference baselines instead of human ones, deterministic reproduction instead of human scoring, an open machine-refutation window instead of a human challenge period.

1. vg-1 · A pre-registered frame-construction success with zero contamination floor

   A registered-future attempt (or sealed synthetic-world probe) resolved successful: the constructed frame graded correct against the sealed ground truth by the pinned deterministic grader, with the attempt timestamp-anchored before the reveal was knowable, and the grading reproducible bit-for-bit by any party.

2. vg-2 · Deterministic reproduction

   Any party — human or machine — re-runs the pinned pipeline from the sealed artifacts and obtains bit-identical results. Reproducibility is the credibility; non-reproducibility is the only admissible refutation.

3. vg-3 · Scaffold ablation

   Evidence that the frame move originates in the system, not the harness: ablation runs demonstrating the success survives removal of scaffold-supplied structure.

4. vg-4 · Formal reference baselines

   The task is calibrated mechanically rather than against humans: a null/random-predictor score, an optimal-bounded-solver reference, the ablation difference (frame-disclosed minus frame-withheld), and the cross-family spread — together establishing that the task is hard in principle and that success is not trivially reachable. Where a task can be proven underdetermined by observation alone, that proof is the baseline.

5. vg-5 · Transfer

   The same system exhibits frame construction on a second, structurally different probe — one success is an anecdote.

Amendment requires a revision-log entry, an anchored release, and a Press notice — and a verdict moved under an amended protocol must say so. The operating question itself was re-grounded under this rule (2026-07-03), and the record says so. Governance details on /governance/.

Retired · preserved, not deleted

The historical probe suites

The instrument's first designs were time-sliced historical probes — six retracing Einstein's path to general relativity, five more in lower-contamination domains (Mendel, Wegener, plate tectonics, germ theory, double-entry). They were honest designs with a named flaw the record kept stating: grading "did the system make the frame move?" on a historical episode requires human judgment, and every corpus already contains the answers. Under constitution v3 (mechanical sufficiency) such probes are out of the instrument's scope by its own law, so the suites are retired — preserved here as record artifacts with their statuses frozen, superseded by the sealed worlds whose contamination floor is zero by construction and whose grading needs no judge.