Strip BrainlessLab back to a library for 0.3.0

[btgaskin]

Strips BrainlessLab back to a library for the 0.3.0 release. It ships the canonical node, the core task protocols, and the machinery to extend both. It ships no experimental results and no benchmark record.

This is breaking. Scores computed with 0.2.0 do not carry over.

Why

A review of the repository at HEAD found that the two scoring paths disagreed, that a completed evolution run produced 3.0 GB of checkpoints beside 3.6 MB of results, that the one committed benchmark record could no longer be reproduced by the library shipping beside it, and that Pkg.test() reported success after running a fifth of the tests.

What changed

Scoring windows

simulate and the composition path used min(ticks, default_window), silently discarding the rest of a longer run — a 2,000-tick tracking simulation scored its final 200 ticks, where the between-seed spread is four times the mean. The typed evaluation path already scored the full post-warmup interval, so the two disagreed.

Both now score the whole run. TaskSpec gains minimum_scored_ticks — Pong 6,000 (it emits roughly one ball event per 305 ticks), Tracking 2,000, Wall 200 — and an evaluation below the minimum is rejected rather than scored. An explicit window acknowledges a deliberately short diagnostic run. A task whose default_ticks falls below its own minimum is rejected at registration. The effective window is recorded on every outcome and in every record.

Anchors

No anchor value changed. Provenance now records scored_ticks, because calibration rate-matches the reference firing rate over the scoring window: an anchor measured over a different window is a different anchor. Over 32 seeds, Wall's floor moves 0.81609 → 0.77244 between window 200 and window 1,000. Every shipped anchor was already measured at exactly the interval the v2 protocol scores.

Evolution records

Each generation wrote the entire candidate archive to date, so total checkpoint disk was quadratic in generations: 3.0 GB for a 60-generation run. Checkpoints now carry strategy state only and retain the newest two, reconstructing the archive from the record's own CSV tables. Per-checkpoint size is constant in generation count — measured at 23,047 and 23,053 bytes for generations 9 and 10 of a 10-generation run.

This also closed a records defect: for a custom measure, the per-trial values behind every aggregate previously existed only inside checkpoints. Retention alone would have deleted them. candidates.csv is now written incrementally and per-trial values persist as measure_value.

Surface

• :falandays is the only name for the canonical node; the :falandays_base duplicate registration is removed.
• Nine Falandays variants removed. Registered nodes are :falandays, :null_random, :sorn, :compartmental_dense, :compartmental_structured, :homeostatic_flow_v2. The Dale, UnsignedAxis and OosawaDrive mechanisms stay on the base reservoir — they are what the sealed parity fixtures exercise, and all three parity cases still pass at near_fraction = 0.0.
• bench removed. It was the only evaluation path producing no record, and its default protocol scored Pong over a single ball event: raw values across eight seeds were [0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0]. Cross-node comparison is a BenchmarkPlan; parameter exploration is a SweepPlan.
• Benchmark v1 retired: its normalised column no longer reproduced after the anchors were recalibrated (pong 0.2396 recorded vs 0.2956 current), and it predated the Pong window fix. v2 is the single core protocol, shipped as a declared protocol with no record.
• Pre-pipeline contribution support generalised from one hardcoded record to validated generic support, with path-containment and record-bundle checks.
• Manifest.toml untracked, and each record now captures the dependency graph that produced it as environment/Manifest.toml, sealed in the record inventory and checksums. A downstream resolver ignores a dependency's manifest anyway, reading only Project.toml and [compat]; all eight deps and every test extra carry bounds. A single tracked manifest drifts with the branch, whereas the per-record copy pins the resolution that actually ran.
• Top-level layout: 28 tracked entries → 25. archive/ removed; calibration/, configs/ and sweep/ folded into tools/.
• The evolution experiment plan is retired. Its run completed and the frozen vector did not survive held-out evaluation — Pong +0.036 (1.3 SEM), tracking −0.115, wall 0.984 → 0.000 on 40 of 40 seeds — so no comparison arm ships.

Tests

Pkg.test() now runs every suite. It defaulted to core: 14 files of 67 assigned, after which it printed "tests passed". The tiers still parallelise CI and give a fast local loop via BRAINLESSLAB_TEST_SUITE=core, but they no longer define what "tested" means.

Verification

Full suite on the final commit: 8232 passed, 0 broken, 0 failed, 0 errored. The suite has no skipped assertions.

The passing count moved deliberately: −27 removing duplicate alias assertions, +5 generalising pre-pipeline contributions, −454 removing the Falandays variants with their tests (431 from five deleted variant-only files, 23 variant-only assertions in shared files). Tests that merely used a variant as a fixture were retargeted rather than deleted.

Site builds clean at 37 pages with no route to the removed benchmark.

Wall cross-implementation discrepancy — resolved

Two @test_skips had recorded an unexplained mismatch against single_agent_wall.npz. It was never a bug: 6552af5 deliberately re-based WallBox off the v0.2 Python crho implementation onto the Falandays authors' conventions — sensor rays from the sensor point rather than the centre, translation along the old heading before rotating, clamp-and-slide collisions, and a post-collision turn from the new heading. The fixture predates that commit. Switching the first two back reproduces it bit-exactly across all 120 ticks.

The recorded "deviation of exactly 1.0" was a red herring: measured from the default centre pose rather than the fixture's env_draws, and with effectors drawn from {0, 0.25} and no collisions, distance is always a multiple of 0.125 — eight quanta is coincidence, not a fencepost.

The skips are deleted rather than enabled, since they can never pass against a crho-derived trajectory, and replaced by what the fixture does prove independent of wall geometry: driving the pinned reservoir with its own recorded sensor currents reproduces its spikes and effectors to 1e-9. The four conventions are now recorded in WallBox.jl; their existing only in a commit message is why this read as a mystery.

Review round

An external review found eight defects, all verified and fixed. Six were introduced by this branch.

Plans failed at execution. minimum_scored_ticks was enforced in evaluate() rather than in validation, so all five shipped plans passed check and died at run — plans/examples/* scored 100 ticks against a 2,000-tick tracking minimum, and the structured-CTRNN smoke scored 2. SKILL.md:99 calls these "executable syntax checks". The constraint moved into plan validation across every operation, and the plans were resized (keeping budgets small by cutting replication rather than by weakening the guard). All five verified executing to DONE.

Unscored tasks were gated by an objective minimum. :torus declares score_key = nothing but inherited a 1,000-tick minimum, so profiling it short failed — contradicting SKILL.md:189. The minimum is now skipped when a task declares no scalar outcome.

Records could not be replayed. A record stored only the SHA-256 of a locally generated manifest, which cannot reconstruct a dependency graph. Records now embed environment/Manifest.toml as a sealed artifact.

Proof caches could mark untested work as proven. Suite digests contained no dependency-graph information after the manifest was untracked, so a dependency moving within compat left the key unchanged; and the digest still named calibration/configs after they moved to tools/, silently contributing nothing. Both fixed, and a declared-but-missing digest root now throws rather than quietly weakening the key.

Three correctness gaps in evolution records. A partial models/ directory permanently blocked resume (model artifacts now stage outside the record and rename atomically); held-out rows omitted measure_value, so a custom measure's aggregate could not be audited; and minimisation runs recorded reversed convergence extrema.

Known-unresolved

Nothing outstanding.