The game has never had a board you simply clear out, and the request for one
turned out to need a construction of its own rather than a denser deep lock.
Filling cells at random can never work: a packed board has nothing that can
move — measured over forty random fills of a 37-cell board, zero pieces free in
all six orientations, every time, because a piece steps to the next cell before
it can leave and on a full board that cell is taken.
So packBoard builds backwards. Start empty, add only a piece that could leave
right now, and the placement order reversed is a removal order — solvability
becomes a property of the construction. Which cell to fill next decides
everything: at random it stalls near half, while filling the most constrained
cell first takes a 19-cell interior to 96% and fills it outright.
The rim is deliberately empty. Those pieces leave first and ask nothing, and
clearing from the rim inward gives a packed board its own difficulty curve
inside one level — the outer cells read easily, and it tightens as it opens.
Two things were tried against the ceiling and failed, and are recorded as such:
depth-first backtracking made it worse on both counts (65-78% filled against
greedy's 89%, at 2000-3000 seconds a board) because recomputing every cell's
legal directions per node spends the budget three levels deep. And the audit's
dead-turn gate could not be trusted here at all — on a packed board its breadth
search truncates, so it certified levels the rule bot then walked through three
blind turns in a row. The pool is filtered by playing it instead: a full pass
takes one second and does not lie.
The campaign is 32 packed levels to 18 deep locks, alternating, with the closing
six at a completely full interior. Same rule bot, both editions: worst blind
streak 1 either way, dead taps zero, and half again as much to do per level.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A crowded board and a deep lock cannot be the same level — at five turns with
eight pieces per orientation, 16 of 18 candidates fail the release gate, because
pieces packed in leave no room for a turn to open two of them. So the campaign
alternates the two instead of ramping one: crowded stretches for the pleasure of
clearing a full board, deep stretches as the variation between them, and the
last four are the fullest boards in the set.
24 crowded, 14 deep, 12 sparse-and-shallow to open on. Density climbs across the
crowded stretches (0.36 → 0.40 → 0.42 → 0.44) since that is the axis left once
depth is spoken for.
select-50 takes --id and --name so this edition is built beside the first rather
than over it; the fifty already played stay exactly as they are.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 3 tested one hypothesis from round 2's data: levels the agent rated 3
carried 59% more 反差 than the rest, so select for it. With both rounds now at
~100 runs, the answer is in and it is no. The back band went from 2.39 ± 0.10 to
2.19 ± 0.08, roughly two standard errors apart, and the levels averaging 2.5 or
better fell from 11 to 6. Contrast is real and it does correlate with being
rated harder; selecting on it does not produce harder levels.
The low retest reliability does not rescue the change either — r = 0.55 limits
ranking one level against another, not the mean of eighteen levels measured a
hundred times.
So round 2's levels are the ones handed over, rebuilt from its runs via
round-set --emitCampaign. select-50 cannot reproduce them: the pool it drew
from has been rebuilt since, so the same flags now return different levels. The
runs are the record.
Rule bot on the shipped set: 50/50 cleared, dead taps 0.00, blind rotations
0.12, worst blind streak 1. 198 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The round comparison was about to be wrong. levels/campaign-50-r2.json was
copied from levels/campaign-50.json to preserve "the set round 2 played", but
select-50 writes that path in place and several selection experiments ran
between the round and the copy. The file kept 28 of the 50 boards round 2 had
actually played and 46 of round 3's — so the comparison was scoring one round
against another round's levels, and it read as round 3 regressing.
Runs store the whole board and its campaign index, so a round is its own record
and cannot drift. round-set.mjs rebuilds it, the report uses that, and the
snapshot file is gone rather than left lying around looking authoritative.
With the rounds correctly matched, round 3 is not a regression and not an
improvement: back band 2.17 against round 2's 2.39, on a rating that retests at
0.55, which is not enough to separate seventeen levels. The report says that
rather than picking whichever reading flatters the change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 2 rated 16 runs a 3 and 84 a 2, which is too little spread to rank levels
by — but enough to ask what the 3s had in common. Contrast: 32.6 against 20.5,
a 59% gap and by far the largest of any feature. Rotation depth came second at
+1.2 turns. Board size and longest route ran the *other* way: the levels rated
harder were slightly smaller with shorter routes, which is what the design brief
has said all along — 难是难在用户无法一下子判断, not in how much board there is.
So within a depth, picking evenly across the ranked slice was diluting the one
thing the brief calls the point of the game. The depth quota already supplies
the difficulty range; inside a depth there is nothing to spread for, so it takes
the highest-contrast levels instead.
Taken alone that collapses the route grammars — two families filled 36 of the
50 — so the family cap comes down to 0.26. The pair beats the shipped round on
both axes rather than trading one for the other: contrast 14.8 / 22.0 / 27.9 →
15.2 / 24.9 / 28.6, families {18,12,8,2,10} → {13,13,5,9,10}. Same rule bot,
mechanics unchanged: worst blind streak still 1, dead taps still 0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Round 1 played all fifty levels and came back with the mechanics clean and one
complaint repeated across the reports: 短暂以为转错了方向 — a turn that changed
nothing. That one is mechanical rather than perceptual, so it can be gated.
The first attempt gated `doubleDead`, and it was wrong. That counts dead states,
which scales with the state space: three-turn levels have ~187 reachable stuck
states and five-turn ones ~739, so a raw count made deep levels look eight times
worse when the rate is 2% against 5%. It would have erased every level past
three turns — the opposite of the brief, where turning is the signature and is
not to be rationed. The gate is `maxDeadTurns`, the longest run of turns before
something opens, at 1: one beat of suspense, then a release. Eleven of the fifty
shipped at 2.
Selection could not express the curve either. Spreading picks evenly over the
ranked pool returns whatever the pool is made of, and the pool is 88%
three-turn, so no weighting moved the distribution off {3: 46}. A quota per
depth states the curve outright, deepest first so the scarce end picks before a
family cap is spent on levels the shallow end has hundreds of.
Same rule bot, both sets: blind rotations 0.24 → 0.12, worst blind streak 4 → 1,
decisions unchanged at 10.3. The same amount to do, half the wasted motion.
Rotation now runs 1.8 / 3.0 / 4.1 across the bands against 1.8 / 3.0 / 3.5.
Verdicts are keyed by the board rather than by its id, because a reselect
re-issues ids from the ordinal and `c50-01-v05` is not the same board before and
after — the review sheet was one reselect away from printing one level's verdict
under another's thumbnail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The deep-lock construction cannot go below three turns, so it cannot supply an
opening band — every level it makes lands mid-difficulty and the curve comes
out flat. harvest-easy pulls the shallow end from the shipped v0.5 set, but
only the 3% of it that holds up: 568 of 1000 need no rotation at all and 51
more are clearable by tapping at random, which is what the monkey threshold is
for. 33 levels survive, at one and two turns.
select-50 scores candidates on mechanical features only, spreads the pick
evenly across that range, and caps any one route grammar at 36% so the campaign
cannot quietly become one template repeated — the shipped 1000 turned out to be
thirty. Weights are a flag, so refitting them from a round of agent ratings is
a re-run rather than an edit.
The result is a curve rather than a plateau: difficulty score 3.85 / 6.24 /
7.60 across the three bands, rotations 1.8 / 3.0 / 3.5, and every level keeps
three or more opening choices with a show of at least a second.
The 50 register as a playable campaign edition, so review happens in the real
game; docs/review-50.html is the handover sheet, one card per level with the
opening position drawn from the solver rather than sketched.
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>
Every model that played the D5 set complained about the same moment: two
pieces left, interlocked, and nothing on the board saying which way to turn.
codex-spark took it to the end — it cycled all six orientations on L18 and
gave up on a level that was solvable, with clarity rated 5. Replaying the
position shows exactly one of the six orientations releases anything.
deadTurnAudit now reports endgameMinOpen: across reachable states with three
pieces or fewer left, the fewest orientations that release anything. It is
computed inside the walk that was already happening, so it costs nothing. The
generator requires at least two.
The gate picks out precisely the four levels every model stalled on, with no
false positives — the other fourteen already had two or three. Regenerating
drops the spiral family entirely: its structure produces single-exit endgames
by construction, not by unlucky seed.
Measured on the regenerated set, rule bot first and then grok-4.6 xhigh over
all 18:
blind rotations 1.17 -> 0.29 per level
extra rotations 1.22 -> 0.35
dead taps 2 -> 0
run time 55.5s -> 34.7s
stuck rating 1.89 -> 1.41 (this metric repeats at r = 0.85)
"which way do I turn" complaints 22% -> 12% of levels
The gate is a floor, not a difficulty dial: difficulty also fell, 2.39 -> 2.12,
because the levels it removes are the hard ones. And it treats a symptom — the
t0/t3 interlock is what the four-piece chain in createDeepLock builds by
construction, so the complaint is halved rather than gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The shipped 1000 levels have a hole: 568 of them need no rotation at all, and
none needs more than two — the mechanic the game is built on is mostly
decoration. This fills the empty band with levels that need at least three.
createDeepLock builds a four-piece chain where each link only releases at a
later orientation, and growDeepLevel packs the rest of the board around it
without opening a shortcut. Candidate pools are built per orientation and left
untruncated; ranking by bend count first starved the packer and capped levels
at four to six pieces instead of twelve.
deadTurnAudit enumerates every reachable (orientation, remaining-set) state to
prove no dead ends exist, and counts how long a player can be left with
nothing to do — solvable and feeling solvable are different things, which is
what "level 2 is impossible" turned out to be about.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Restore v0.1 and v0.2 archives with separate progress, publish the curved v0.3 campaign, and document the original 24-level design with reproducible evidence. Refine board presentation and movement, and keep video lab tooling within its own directory.
