# v1 — Experiments

Every change to El on `iteration-1` was produced by one loop, run repeatedly:

```
Ishikawa  →  scientific method  →  Six Sigma  →  repeat
```

- **Ishikawa** — name the root cause, not the symptom. *Why is this table here?*
  never *why is this table ugly?*
- **Scientific method** — state a hypothesis, **commit predictions before
  running**, then run it in an isolated worktree and grade every prediction
  including the ones that failed.
- **Six Sigma** — eliminate the defect *class*, then add a control so it cannot
  silently return.

## The organising finding

**Predictions that came back FALSE were worth more than the ones that held.**

Nineteen cycles, sixty-one predictions. The eleven that failed produced every
significant result:

| Failed prediction | What it found |
|---|---|
| "the arity table has drifted from the header" | Zero drift — but **110 functions had no entry at all**. The table was not wrong, it was 40% incomplete. |
| "codegen drops below baseline" (×4) | The **traversal is irreducible**. Walking an AST to find calls does not move no matter who decides. Only the rule and the judgment leave. |
| "guards cannot refuse through the seam" | One line, and refusal works. Six compile-time kinds were unnecessary. |
| "C forbids the struct redefinition" | C allows shadowing — and a *different* defect surfaced: an exit injection emitted with an empty target. |
| "routing el_bin_lookup through the gate fixes the SIGSEGV" | It did not. The **fallback** was the hazard: `strlen()` on an integer. I would have shipped the wrong fix and called it verified. |

A prediction that only ever confirms is a demonstration, not a test. One cycle
was run **without** committing predictions first — `async-half-expressible` —
and it produced a rigged result: `pthread_join` immediately after
`pthread_create`, with the word `DEFERRED` printed by the test itself. It had to
be discarded and re-run.

## Layout

```
cycles/     one file per loop, numbered in order, named for the DEFECT
findings/   what the cycles produced, cross-cut by kind
```

## Scoreboard

```
cycles run                     19
predictions committed          61
predictions FALSE              11   ← the useful ones
silent miscompilations found    4
security-relevant defects       2
architecture questions closed   5
defects in my own measurement   4
```

Every cycle verified the same three things before landing: the compiler
self-hosts byte-identically (gen2 == gen3), the native suite passes, and the
integration harnesses pass. A cycle that could not show all three did not land.