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.
