The chain locks all four of its pieces at the opening by construction, and the
pieces grown around it are mostly locked too, so a level built from it hands a
player two rim pieces and a third of a second of animation before any thinking
starts. Measured across the 235-level pool: median two tappable pieces at the
opening, and the best departure available plays for 0.57s.
Growth now reserves a couple of slots for showcase pieces — tappable at the
opening, with a route long enough to read as a journey and short enough to stay
under the animation ceiling. Median opening choices go 2 to 3 and the best
opening show 0.72s to 1.12s, without shortcutting the lock: each candidate is
still put through the solver.
Rotation quota is gone from the board. Turning is free and it is what the game
is about, so depth is grown rather than capped; what is gated is whether each
turn pays out, whether pieces swing between hopeless and trivial, and whether
there is a show up front.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chain built its own worst moment: hero and tail deadlock at orientations 0
and +2 and open only at +1, with +3/+4/+5 left entirely to chance. That is why
some levels released at exactly one of six orientations, and why every model
kept writing "I don't know which way to turn" — at +2 one direction was right
and the other five were dead ends.
createDeepLock now traces candidates at all six orientations and requires the
tail to also release at +3, certified with the real swept tracer. A player
stuck at +2 turns either way and something moves. Measured by the rule bot
over the regenerated set: blind rotations, wrong-way turns and extra rotations
all go to zero, from 1.17 / 0.44 / 1.22 per level. Endgame orientation counts
shift from {1:4, 2:10, 3:4} to {2:3, 3:13, 4:1}.
It costs yield: switchback r3 and crossing r3 now produce nothing, and the set
comes out at 17 levels rather than 18. The test witnesses moved with it — a
witness is whichever seed still satisfies the construction, so they are
re-derived from the sweep rather than pinned.
docs/level-board.html is the task board for getting to 50 levels. Task state is
in bench/board.json; every number on the page — candidate count, rotation
quota, blind turns, monkey actions-per-piece, the agent batches — is measured
from the level set and the run archive at build time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
design-review.html is the gameplay and UI read on the shipped campaign, with
boards rendered from the repo's own geometry rather than redrawn.
bench-reliability.html asks which of the bench's numbers are worth acting on,
and answers it by running the same 18 levels twice under identical conditions.
The mechanical rotation counters reproduce (r = 0.82-0.92) and three different
models agree on them level for level, so they measure the level rather than
the player — a 12-second rule-bot sweep gets the same answer as hours of
model time. Difficulty and stuck ratings also hold up (r = 0.93 / 0.85), but
the ratings for rotation, clarity and fun do not (0.32 / 0.19 / 0.56): asking
a model whether rotation matters is noise, while counting blind rotations is
not.
Every figure is computed from bench/runs by build-bench-report.mjs; nothing in
the page is hand-written, so it can be regenerated as runs accumulate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
