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>
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>
