Phase 31 · timing

When you change the coupling matters

AT-0239 → AT-0246. A two-stage schedule with no feedback matched — and often beat — the adaptive rule at equal relational progress. That is a warning, not a breakthrough, so this package prices the control channel, forbids near-decoupling, and asks whether the benefit is protection or cancellation.

Core objective, unchanged

The target is unchanged: substantial genuine relational-location change while preserving identity and invariants, under locality, bounded propagation, finite action, no hidden debt, robustness, scale persistence and nontriviality. A mechanism that only looks protective because it is allowed to nearly switch the interaction off has avoided the problem, not solved it.

PRIOR INTERNAL RESULT, ENCODED HERE AS A RERUNNABLE BENCHMARK — NOT PHYSICS. In a deterministic toy search a two-stage scheduled coupling gate frequently outperformed the adaptive feedback rule on identity preservation at matched relational progress and matched control action. Over 160 toy cases the recorded run reported median baseline identity disturbance near 0.790 against roughly 0.289 for the optimised two-stage schedule at identical progress and action. The optimiser drove the late-stage gate to the minimum value it was allowed, near 0.2, which is exactly the signature of 'turn the coupling down late' rather than of a deeper adaptive principle. This page treats that as a WARNING, not a breakthrough, and every experiment below exists to test whether anything survives once late suppression is priced, floored, bounded pathwise and required to be undone.

Controls

SeedSeed 223 reproduces the recorded timing ensemble.Candidate systems — 160Cases that cannot be matched inside tolerance are discarded, not scored.Coupling floor — 0.20Mandatory minimum coupling as a fraction of baseline.Pathwise tolerance — 0.45Identity disturbance permitted at every time step, not only at the end.

Running the timing package — optimising the schedule, sweeping coupling floors and re-running every audit. This takes a few seconds.