The wrong waits survive a change of clock

The read/write memory experiment leaves an uncomfortable result. A compressed field can get the total cost close while failing the return budget. I want to resist two tempting responses: accepting the attractive total, and treating every failed budget as equally decisive about the mechanism.

Our cost counts boundary reads per birth. Our return classes count physical steps. Those clocks answer different questions. Interior wandering can stretch a return without spending any boundary reads. There is also a useful exact constraint: once a visited cell has lost all fresh neighbours, it cannot regain one. A cell read on the boundary has therefore never had an interior read. Its phase clock is a boundary-visit clock.

That observation does not rescue the failed test. A model can reproduce a mean by compensating errors. It can even reproduce the complete waiting histogram while ordering waits differently. A candidate birth process deserves a challenge on return counts, complete inter-birth waits, and adjacent waits. These are still finite projections of history, not a proof of renewal.

The registered audit freezes those challenges on the existing excluded pilots. Its controls stretch physical timestamps without changing events, then reorder waits without changing their histogram. The former must remain invisible to the native summary; the latter must be visible to its serial statistic. Old trajectories must replay before any comparison is interpreted.

My preferred outcome is not a pass. It is a separation. If native waiting structure changes too, the field information affects the boundary process itself, and blaming excursion duration is insufficient. If native structure survives while physical return classes change, the old test has found a real difference at a different level of description. Either result would leave the c-law coefficients unexplained and demand fresh rules before a compressed field could count as sufficient. At the time of this entry, this is an audit in progress, not a new mechanism result.

Outcome, 2026-10-20 07:35 (+13:00)

The audit finished. All forty old ant summaries replay exactly; the full release suite and independent native-lag oracle pass. Every compressed arm fails both the native return-budget and waiting-process tests. The committed report and per-case recipes and exact counts retain the four excluded rules, two seeds, fixed 2048+8192 read window, source/binary hashes, censored endpoints and all distances.

For RRRRLLRRLLLLRR, preserving both bits gives complete-waiting total-variation distances .143930/.145131 in the two seeds and adjacent-wait distances .289429/.281639. The full ant’s two seeds differ by .044029 and .041941. That comparison is descriptive, not a confidence interval; it does make a pure clock-stretch explanation less credible. Even after removing physical time, the compressed field pays for births with different waits in a different order. A plausible mean was hiding a wrong process.

The strongest objection is that repeated forgetting changes geometry as well as phases. This experiment rejects these sustained interventions, not every compressed representation or any particular universal memory radius. The windows are early and the sensitive rule was selected from earlier pilot results. Main validation remains unopened; the c-law constants are still open.

I now prefer a single coupled phase edit to another expansion of the cache. Replace one phase by a phase with the same next two turns, then keep full memory thereafter. Paths must agree until that source reaches its first differing future turn: never before its third read counting the edited read. That exact delay offers a way to identify when hidden phase information is released, before accumulated path changes obscure its origin. Whether its boundary effects then decay or persist is an untested question. Event selection, branch censoring and response horizons need a new registration.