When a compound operator (e.g. level_compound_fix) creates a new
internal node and explicitly sets its division ratio, that ratio was
silently overridden: warm_x0 received parent.ratios which had no entry
for the new node, so Nelder-Mead started at the default 0.5 instead
of the operator's intended 0.25 (for rrl/rrr). Result: NM evaluated
the compound topology at the wrong geometry and scored 3 fails instead
of 1 — so lex always rejected the compound child, making
level_compound_fix invisible to the outer search.
Fix: for nodes that are genuinely newly divided (not divided in the
parent tree at the same path), inherit the child's operator-set ratio
rather than defaulting to 0.5. Structural mutations (e.g. swap) can
reveal hidden level-N nodes that retain stale pre-writeback ratios —
those are correctly excluded by checking parent_node.divided.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
core_divide: divides a C leaf simultaneously on ALL storeys that share that
path, maintaining staircase consistency as an atomic invariant rather than
requiring multi-step recovery.
core_undivide: reverses core_divide consistently across all floors, merging
a C sub-core back into a single C leaf everywhere.
level_fix: atomically moves a level-constrained room to its required floor
by retyping the largest leaf there and vacating the wrong-floor leaf to C.
Requires `reqs` (SpaceReq dict); disabled (zero probability) without it.
mutate() gains `reqs=None` parameter; driver.search() passes its already-
loaded reqs so level_fix fires during the main memetic loop.
Together these let the optimiser escape the deceptive valley around the
2-fail warmstart: level_fix moves l1 to level 0 (reducing fails 2→1),
then core_divide can split the C core to accommodate the displaced t3.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Outer search now ranks individuals by (-n_fails, fitness) instead of raw
fitness scalar. This prevents high-score 3-fail designs from displacing
2-fail designs in tournament selection and population replacement — the
root cause of the §4.8 pathology where flag count dominates geometry.
Inner loop is unchanged: it still optimises against the raw 0.5^n fitness
scalar, so the cliff that prevents trading into new failures remains intact
(0/9 regressions in experiments/penalty_reshape.py).
Also removes stale _CHILD_INNER_KW = {"sigmas": (0.05,)}: this was left
over from the CMA-ES era; the NM inner loop default (homemaker-py-d6d)
does not accept a sigmas parameter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
