Jahni's call to pin it and move on, and the right one -- six builds spent and the
information stopped being worth the cost.
The final run closed it as far as it can be: SDFs identical everywhere (counted
unconditionally, 0 differ), yet two character-identical carve implementations in
the SAME translation unit fed a provably identical input differ by 1 ULP on
126/5000. That is only possible if they compile to different instruction
sequences, which /fp:fast permits based on surrounding context with no single
isolable axis. Hypothesis 3 was right about the mechanism and wrong about every
clean variable proposed for it, which is why four well-designed isolation tests
came back negative.
AUDIT C10 records the observation, what is proven (SDF bit-exact 126/126, zero
isosurface crossings), the five refuted hypotheses in a table so nobody repeats
them at a build each, why the settling experiment is blocked (shared-PCH / IWYU
debt), and the rule that actually matters: never run both density paths in one
world and never compare them for equality. That is NOT a client-desync risk --
within a binary the field is proven bit-pure and every peer runs the same path --
the cross-platform concern is C9, which stands on its own.
Corrected OPSTACK-PLAN 2.6 and C9: my earlier "/fp:fast across translation units"
explanation was measurably wrong and is removed rather than softened.
MazeEquivalence keeps the permanent value (equivalence with ULP grading,
window-invariance, box-verdict brute force) and drops the verbatim copy,
three-way, bisect, inlining and constness experiments.
Phase 1 closed: Maze decomposes into 7 ops, SDF bit-exact, 0 isosurface
crossings, window-invariant, and 23 of 60 tiles proved uniform where ClassifyTile
proves zero.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>