In plain words: the candidate queue resumed with seqICP โ an invariance test with one genuinely new trick: it needs no regime labels at all. Where every instrument so far had to be told "these are the ten regimes," seqICP slices time into blocks by itself and asks whether a relationship holds steady across them. It faced the same ground-truth exam that took the previous candidate five attempts: real data containing one perfectly invariant relationship (two byte-identical columns). It passed on the first form โ accepted every answer containing the truth, rejected every answer without it, identified exactly the right variable, in under 30 seconds. Two honesty notes: the shuffle-based rejection check ignores that neighbouring bars resemble each other (could make rejections too easy โ flagged, same note as the previous candidate carries), and the exam pinned one block layout where the full method scans many. Next comes the hard part: the certificate slot this candidate targets was just filled โ so its cheapest kill is now the redundancy gate: does it measure anything the newly admitted identifier doesn't?
Preflight (A0): 2026-07-09 โ load1 3.34/32c (โค24) ยท 23 GiB avail ยท si/so โ 0 ยท CH + sidecar active ยท no heavy jobs โ ALL PASS. One capped run (0.49 min), complete-case real rows, permutations of real values only. Worktree rebased on main (2 docs commits) before work.
Exam design (pre-registered in-script before running)
Element
Choice
Candidate mechanism
seqICP (PfisterโBรผhlmannโPeters 2018 JASA): pooled OLS per subset; environments constructed from the TIME structure โ B=10 contiguous blocks over the pooled chronological series, zero env labels; decoupled block-mean + block-variance residual statistics; Bonferroni combination; K=99 permutation null
Recorded caveats (verify-before-report): (i) row-permutation null breaks serial dependence โ E2 possibly anticonservative; block-null refinement is M2 material (the same standing note e-ICP-fp carries from row 34); (ii) the bounded form fixes one block decomposition where the paper scans a grid. Neither touches E1 (driven by exact zero residuals, null-free).
The looming gate: seqICP targets the STABLE-identification role โ which rows 34โ35 just filled on both substrates with e-ICP-fp. M3's redundancy attack against e-ICP-fp's per-feature outputs is therefore the cheapest kill: |ฯ| โฅ 0.95 โ EXCLUDE(redundant). Survival requires either low correlation or a demonstrably uncovered failure mode โ the candidate's claim is env-free operation (works where regime labels are wrong or absent).
โถ Next iteration
Next firing: H-016 seqICP ladder walk โ M3 head-to-head vs e-ICP-fp (per-feature invariance readouts on the crypto pool, correlation attack), M2 substrate note (block-null), M4/M5โฒ per the sealed pattern if M3 clears. A kill at M3 is a clean, proud EXCLUDE(redundant) and B-01 advances to H-023 IAS. Independently unlockable: a STABLE-declaration proposal from the three identified crypto sets (row 34). Standing for the operator: the 73 cycle-1 draft statuses (iters 11/13) and the Frontier #4 expiry-monitor precondition review.
Iteration 27 ยท 2026-07-09 ยท CHECKPOINT (row 36) โ exam PASS on first form ยท capped ยท zero synthetic data ยท append-only ยท evidence: seqicp_exam.py ยท seqicp_exam_results.json