Phase 27 · attack the leader
Matched-budget mechanism tournament
AT-0207 → AT-0214. Every family runs on one explicit resource budget, and the toy leader — adaptive coupling geometry — is then attacked five separate ways. It is promoted only if the advantage survives all five.
Core objective, unchanged
Lawful substantial change in gauge-invariant / operational relational location while preserving identity and invariants, respecting locality and bounded propagation, carrying no hidden debt, spending finite action, remaining robust, persisting across scale, and staying nontrivial.
Plain language
Last round, one idea looked like it was winning. But it was also allowed to use more machinery than the others, and the scoreboard we used was one we invented. This page hands every idea the same fixed allowance — the same number of moving parts, the same control effort, the same penalty for extra complexity — and then spends most of its effort trying to break the leader rather than praise it. If changing the scoreboard changes the winner, we say so and call the ranking metric-dependent.
Budget controls
Running matched tournament…
Where this sits
This page inherits every earlier constraint. See AT-0199 → AT-0206 for the unmatched tournament that produced this leader, where the path breaks for the gauge-invariance audit each progress number must respect, and the blocker ledger for the standing obstacles each column encodes.