4-way comparison (NM / CMA-ES / compass / compass-ms) over 3 corpus files ×
3 seeds at budget 200, cold-start, URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1. CMA-ES wins on
batch-efficiency (18 oracle calls vs 200 for NM, 12x speedup on Perl startup
amortisation per §4.6) with acceptable quality (x1.41 @200 vs NM's x1.56).
Compass stalls on narrow-valley landscapes and introduces fail regressions.
NM flagged as Phase 3+ candidate once native fitness removes oracle call overhead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
