01 Hypothesis: blue and red carry partly redundant visual information. Enforce blue=.6red and substitute the same relation in all perception weights, freeing a potential latch coordinate without changing architecture. This initial test asks whether development survives the constraint; no arrest yet. Ratio .6 is a simple heuristic, not fitted regression.
01 interpretation: blue constraint preserves maturation at56 and t96 appearance, but worsens long-time drift. Useful representation for a latch, not a persistence solution.
02 hypothesis: use q=blue-.6red as a bounded exponential timer. Repurpose units7,78 for timer growth and saturation and115 as gated bias carrier. Negative q suppresses original hidden units and eventually all physical updates; three removed units may harm growth. Gate2, initial drive1e-5, timer gain.2. Static construction only.
02 interpretation: timer does arrest many cells but transition badly distorts geometry and new peripheral cells keep growing; reject this implementation.
03 hypothesis: W2 has one near-null output singular value .075 versus next .400. Quantization may introduce drift in an approximately conserved channel combination. Project W2 and b2 orthogonally to its smallest right singular vector, restoring an exact invariant. This is static SVD of weights, not a fitted regression, gradient or optimization.
03 interpretation: exact conserved near-null output mode still develops well but fails late. Eliminating all adaptive motion in that mode is wrong; a restoring feedback might work better.
04 hypothesis: measure whether removing low early-contribution units7 and16 preserves development. They are potential slots for a two-ReLU signed homeostatic feedback term, unlike the prior unsuccessful replacement of24 units. No added feedback in this diagnostic candidate.
04 interpretation: removal preserves maturation but destabilizes late dynamics, so spare units are not truly dispensable.
05 hypothesis: replace only unit16 with an always-active linear homeostatic term -.01*z*(z dot state), where z is the smallest right singular vector of original W2. Large bias10 plus compensating b2 makes one ReLU implement signed feedback on bounded states. This arrests accumulating color/alpha imbalance while allowing original nonzero mode updates; unit7 and115 remain intact.
05 interpretation: feedback prevents extinction and one run remains gecko-like but second expands severely. Unit16 removal may induce spatial vulnerability.
06 hypothesis: retain the identical signed near-null-mode feedback but place it in lower early-contribution unit7, restoring original16. This separates homeostat behavior from donor damage.
06 interpretation: unit7 donor leads to extinction. Donor choice critically matters; return to16, which preserved viability.
07 hypothesis: the homeostat should preserve a nonzero mature mode rather than force it tozero. Modify target to z dot x=.05alpha, a simple near-mature magnitude motivated by observed positive mode at96. Retain .01 gain and original neuron7.
07 interpretation: nonzero target improves aggregate score slightly but retains severe expansion in one trajectory.
08 hypothesis: revise autonomous latch to a linear tiny clock followed by rapid gain1 runaway and stable saturation. Initial rate2e-6, threshold.0002, gate5. Keep protective115 and use7/16/111 instead. The long almost-invisible delay followed by fast switching should avoid the gradual distortion in02; blue clips tozero after latch, which may consume color-error tolerance.
08 interpretation: better initial development but ongoing peripheral growth and latch-transition distortion persist.
09 hypothesis: make threshold crossing almost abrupt using capped gain100 feedback: -100[relu(-q-.0001)-relu(-q-.0101)], with tiny clock drive unchanged. Later q decreases linearly rather than exponentially, finite over audit horizons. Faster arrest near age100 should minimize perturbation before shutoff. Same donor slots and gating; representation explicitly permits a changing clipped blue clock after visible arrest.
09 interpretation: successful autonomous visible arrest near256, stable shape thereafter. IoU .897/.895 but color RMSE .189/.181 fails. Blue clipping consumes tolerance; timer mechanism itself is useful.
10 hypothesis: move redundant coordinate to hidden space. Remove lowest mature-energy hidden direction constrained orthogonal to seed all-ones vector. Static covariance eigendecomposition defines an orthogonal representation projection, not regression. First test development with no clock: all visible channels retained. Eigenvalue 0.0456493659407764; vector [ 0.23905991 -0.37546003 -0.2844506   0.32089102  0.26210135  0.166389
  0.40171653 -0.573277    0.08780065 -0.03117235 -0.0997619  -0.11383665]
10 interpretation: hidden projection distorts growth too much, so blue representation remains more promising.
11 hypothesis: retain blue clock but bound its final displacement at about-.01002 rather than letting blue cliptozero. Two hinges with gains-1000 and1001 at thresholds1e-5 and2e-5 yield derivative -q-.01002 after crossing, hence one-step attraction to a tiny offset. Gate500 makes that tiny offset sufficient for arrest. Initial rate1e-7 gives roughly200 steps of local aging, while threshold crossing is sharp. Float32 precision may perturb clock timing; that is tested by the evaluator.
11 interpretation: bounded small-amplitude clock arrests eventually but too late, after visible drift and some peripheral growth. It used local age200 versus age100 in09.
12 hypothesis: double tiny clock rate to2e-7, aligning local arrest age around100 with the successful-shape09, while retaining bounded blue offset and thus preserving blue intensity.
12 interpretation: one full trajectory passes; both visibly arrested, one misses RGB by .0064. Drift before latch still harms color: at96 both RMSE near.11.
13 hypothesis: start the same sharp bounded latch earlier by clock rate3e-7 (local age about67), capturing the mature phenotype before donor-induced color drift. Growth itself matures at64, and late-born cells retain additional development time.
13 interpretation: BOTH development trajectories pass all criteria. Visible arrest holds through2048, but RGB margin only .014/.019 and alpha mass .922/.914.
14 hypothesis: donor111 contributes substantial positive alpha (.174 output weight); donor6 has lower visible contribution and slight negative alpha. Move bias-carrier role from111 to6, restoring111 including its normal gated outputs. This should preserve opacity and color during development while retaining the exact same autonomous clock.
14 interpretation: donor substitution improves both margins substantially: final RGB .117/.111, IoU .920/.914, but mass .925 remains low.
15 hypothesis: bias-carrier activation scale .1 loses up to5percent amplitude during the supposedly quiet timer phase, because gate500*q reaches-.005. Raise carrier scale to.5 and divide its output by5 to preserve original bias while reducing pre-latch attenuation. This also delays bias shutdown within the brief transition; test whether opacity recovers without overshoot.
15 interpretation: carrier scale.5 causes a continuing peripheral growth wave despite acceptable central appearance. Bias shutdown must remain early to avoid fertilizing the boundary. Restore.1.
16 hypothesis: restore donor16, whose visible output norm is relatively large (.183red,.165blue), and use100 for saturation hinge instead. Unit100 has lower observed visible contribution despite somewhat larger total hidden contribution. Keep successful14 clock/gate parameters.
16 interpretation: donor100 still yields two passes but lower silhouette margin; retain donors7/16/6 from14.
17 hypothesis: improve blue reconstruction to blue=red-.2green, a simple chromatic relation with the correct approximate mean and seed-zero timer coordinate. This preserves more color variation than .6red; no fitting or regression. Rewrite perception, blue output and clock consistently. Static residual RMS is diagnostic only.
17 interpretation: blue=red-.2green improves color margins to .109/.103; both pass and arrest.
18 hypothesis: donor7 carries positive alpha feedback, potentially explaining remaining low opacity. Restore7 and use100 for the trigger hinge instead, keeping16/6 roles. Previous16->100 worsened silhouette, but this tests a different missing feedback path: preserving7 while retaining16 removal.
18 interpretation: restoring7 improves all margins, two passes, final RGB .103/.098, IoU .929/.926.
19 hypothesis: timing robustness test, slow clock by17percent to local age80. The mechanism should tolerate slightly later maturity capture; this also tests whether shape gains from more development outweigh drift. Use18 construction otherwise.
19 interpretation: slower clock remains two passes, RGB .104/.101. Saved18 diagnostics show all125 normal hidden units exactlyzero on foreground by256, all non-blue deltas zero, and only <1e-6 blue fluctuation after512. This supports actual arrest rather than slowed dynamics.
20 hypothesis: complementary timing robustness test, increase clock rate17percent above18 to local age57. This tests whether earliest stochastic cells freeze before adequate development; if it passes, the operating point has timing margin on both sides.
20 interpretation: faster arrest creates peripheral traces and one silhouette fails (.797), despite good RGB. Prefer slower19 timing as safer boundary relaxation.
21 hypothesis: halve gate sensitivity to250 at19 timing, reducing pre-arrest perturbation. Final q~-.01002 still supplies a2.5 preactivation subtraction, comfortably exceeding observed mature positive activations near1.3. This may improve morphology while retaining complete arrest; verify hidden activations from returned diagnostics.
21 interpretation: lower gate retains passes but permits peripheral additions and worse silhouette; keep500 gate.
22 hypothesis: suppress fertile low-alpha boundary cells by mild alpha dependence in the bias carrier: h=.1+.02(alpha-.8)+500q. At mature opacity the original bias is retained, but low-alpha frontier receives less positive bias. Use19 clock timing and donors. This may prevent post-arrest peripheral growth, though it could impair initial development.
22 interpretation: mild alpha-dependent carrier improves silhouette and arrests all visible growth; both pass with IoU .931/.931.
23 hypothesis: strengthen the alpha dependence from.02 to.04 to test whether boundary suppression has room before impairing morphogenesis. Original bias still matched atalpha.8. This is a robustness/mechanism test; larger coupling may slow or shrink development.
23 interpretation: doubling alpha dependence still passes but color worsens, so.02 is preferable.
24 hypothesis: revisit the fast local-age57 clock that caused peripheral traces in20, now with alpha-dependent carrier from22. Passing would specifically support the proposed boundary-suppression mechanism and widen timing robustness.
24 interpretation: fast clock now passes both and stops peripheral additions, supporting alpha-dependent boundary gating rather than accidental timing.
25 hypothesis: test the other side, a20percent slower clock than22 (local age100). With the same boundary suppression, this should still capture a mature form before substantial drift; confirms timing tolerance over a meaningful interval.
25 interpretation: slower clock also passes, confirming useful local-age57-100 range with alpha gate.
26 hypothesis: test moderate20percent lower gate strength400 on22, retaining alpha suppression. Unlike21 at250 without alpha dependence, this should retain enough final shutdown margin while reducing quiet-phase perturbation.
26 interpretation: gate400 passes and remains visibly arrested, with similar color and slightly better auxiliary score.
27 hypothesis: complementary20percent stronger gate600 test around22. If quiet-phase suppression is not critically tuned, morphology should survive stronger shutdown, establishing a broad gate interval rather than selecting a single favorable scalar.
27 interpretation: gate600 also passes, with similar appearance;400-600 is robust on these two seeds.
28 hypothesis: test sensitivity to small distributed perturbations of the developmental network. Add fixed random noise of standard deviation1e-4 to original weights/biases, then rebuild the exact clock representation and gate. This preserves timer algebra while perturbing growth; it is a robustness test, not a search for favorable random weights. Noise seed739431, recorded for reproducibility.
28 interpretation: distributed developmental weight perturbation1e-4 preserves both passes and similar metrics.
29 hypothesis: use the exact negative of that perturbation, testing both sides of the same neighborhood rather than selecting favorable noise. Rebuild all clock identities exactly as before; no intended improvement over22.
29 interpretation: opposite perturbation also passes, supporting a nonzero developmental neighborhood.
30 hypothesis: increase the same fixed perturbation to1e-3, a tenfold stress test of developmental robustness. The engineered latch identities remain exact. This is not intended as the selected candidate, even if its score improves.
30 interpretation: even1e-3 developmental perturbation passes with good margins; latch is robust to substantial small network changes when its identities are preserved.
31 hypothesis: reverse all128 hidden-unit indices, a mathematically equivalent network that changes float32 summation order. This probes reliance on a particular numerical cancellation pattern; no new developmental design is introduced.
31 interpretation: mathematically equivalent hidden permutation passes and has nearly identical metrics, ruling out dependence on a unique summation order.
32 hypothesis: reduce trigger gain from1000 to250, enlarging hinge spacing analytically to preserve final clock target-.01002. Smaller opposing output weights reduce numerical cancellation while retaining rapid threshold transition. Quiet-phase timing, gate and alpha dependence unchanged.
32 interpretation: fourfold lower gain250 improves silhouette/mass and keeps arrest; both pass with IoU .939/.940 and RGB .101/.095.
33 hypothesis: push the same analytical gain reduction to64 with unchanged equilibrium target, testing whether a less stiff transition is sufficient. This establishes whether250 is safely above a transition-speed requirement or still unnecessarily large; slower transition may again distort boundaries.
33 interpretation: gain64 still passes, but degrades appearance slightly;250 is an interior, less stiff and better-margin choice.
34 hypothesis: halve the clock coordinate scale of32 (threshold,width,drift allhalved; gate doubled), an analytically equivalent physical-control trajectory with half the blue displacement. This tests finite-precision sensitivity when clock increments approach smaller floating-point scales, rather than changing intended timing.
34 interpretation: half-scale clock also passes with nearly identical morphology; control does not rely on one clock-unit scale.
35 hypothesis: test the opposite coordinate rescaling, doubling threshold,width and drift while halving gate. This improves clock signal relative to float32 rounding but doubles the tiny blue offset; physical intended trajectories remain equivalent. Prefer central32 if both rescalings work.
35 interpretation: doubled coordinate scale also passes with nearly identical metrics;32 sits between two successful numerical scalings.
36 hypothesis: final reproducibility stress test constructs32 algebra in float64 then rounds once tofloat32, rather than accumulating float32 edits. This changes rounding of large gate cancellation and blue substitution slightly while preserving intended mechanism. It tests construction precision dependence; final selection remains based on the complete evidence, not this last score alone.
36 interpretation: float64 construction also passes with virtually identical results. NEW BUDGET EXHAUSTED36/36. FINAL COMMITMENT: evaluation32; sha256 04a6d67331bc97ae3102e4849e178e680ab8d86a20f33e6370f85a1163f33354. Reconstructed arrays and serialized NPZ hash exactly match archived weights. No further revisions or forward calls.