Third qualitatively different experimental shape in the rolling
research log, parallel to the 2026-05-09 witness-sweep widening:
- random-word emergent (honesty under no ground truth)
- witness-sweep (capability under canonical ground truth)
- warrant-chain (rescue-mechanism activation under chain-backed
ground truth) ← new
Captures the structurally-grounded dormancy of #000031 Phase 3
verifier — 0/117 fires across an aggressive A/B with 12/13
chain-root retrieval, plus 5 paraphrase fixture iterations
none of which drive Phase 3 to fire empirically.
Root cause pinned at arborist/qa/warrant.py:507: warrant_check
vacuous-passes unless question shape is relation/date/entity-list/
count/why-cause. Definitional questions don't have warrant shape;
claim-pack chunks are terse axioms without prose context that
warrant-shape questions would retrieve. Phase 3 is structurally
rescue-only on the current corpus.
Mechanism correct + non-regressing + unit-tested. Recommendation:
track fire rate as a corpus-evolution signal, not a fixture-
engineering target. Audit-line tail will surface organic fires.
Adjacent same-day landings noted: #000034 Phase 1a (Hessian-
alignment probe) + #000035 Phase 1 (φ_PRG reference) — both
KAT-pinned cryptographic-primitive infrastructure ahead of v7
plastic-training deployment.
Doc-only update; no code change.
russell@unturf.com
2c683de6d8