Implement a graded proximity comparator key (-n_fails, grade, fitness) behind
a default-off use_grade flag: fitness._leaf_grade / score_with_grade sum
f/FAIL_THRESHOLD over failing per-leaf quality factors; scalar fitness and fail
count stay untouched so the inner-loop 0.5^n cliff (§5.4) is unaffected (0/9
regression check: PASS). Read once per child in driver._evaluate off the
already-optimised tree; threaded through search_staged (Stage 2 only).
Harbor staged A/B (20000 evals, seeds 0/1/2): lex 95/96/106 (mean 99.0) vs
lex+grade 99/98/102 (mean 99.7) — grade wins 1/3, no plateau escape. Premise
falsified: within a fixed fail-tier 0.5^n is constant so fitness still spans
~6 orders of magnitude; grade above fitness displaces that working signal.
Verdict: reject; lexicographic (-n_fails, fitness) stands. Flag kept default-off
for reproducibility / possible reuse as a §11.5 diversity signal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Search the genome in causal dependency order. Stage 1 evolves a single-storey
base over the level-0 room set (programme auto-derived to a tempdir), ranked
with a substrate-readiness bonus (reserved core × divisible capacity) so the
base is selected as a good substrate, not just a good ground floor (anti-§4.2).
Stage 2 lifts the best base into a full multi-storey design — preserving the
inherited core, instantiating each upper storey's required set by construction —
and searches the deltas with the base mutable at low probability (base_p=0.15).
New: programme.{n_storeys_required,partition_rooms_by_storey,write_stage1_programme},
graph.substrate_readiness, operators.{lift_base_to_storeys,_pick_weighted_by_storey},
base_p threading, driver.search rank_bonus_fn/seed_factory/base_p hooks +
search_staged orchestrator, experiments/run_staged_search.py, tests/test_staging.py.
Result (harbor, 20000 evals, seed 0): staged 95 fails vs single-stage 105
(-10, -9.5%), gain in crinkliness 27->18 + edge 12->8. Anti-bungalow confirmed
(Stage-2 core moves all noop — core inherited, not carved). Programme-house
regression PASS (warmstart-2f4 still reaches whole-pop 1-fail).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Make the required programme room set a constructive invariant instead of
something the topology search must stumble onto by random divide+retype.
- operators.constructive_topology: bootstrap seeder that sizes each storey to
its required rooms (partitioned by level; level-free rooms distributed),
+1 core C and +1 O per storey, then assigns types. Stochastic for population
diversity. Wired into driver bootstrap when the programme has required spaces.
- operators.mutate_place_missing: repair op that inserts a missing required
space by dividing a host leaf into [room | remainder]. Lex-safe host ranking
(generic O first, never displace a required room); honours required level.
Weight 2.0 in the mutation mix; noops cheaply once the set is complete.
A/B on harbor-house (20k evals, seed 0, identical config):
old random-bootstrap 133 fails (103 missing, 77%)
new constructive 105 fails ( 12 missing, 11%) -21% total, missing-stack
collapsed; seed head-start 163->139.
§4.10 regression PASS: warmstart-2f4 still reaches a 1-fail population at 50k.
Verdict (DESIGN.md §11.2): construction is necessary and reframes the
bottleneck to quality-fail packing of a complete dense design (crinkliness/
size/access/edge) -> unblocks §11.3 staging, motivates §11.4 graded objective.
Follow-up filed (homemaker-py-s44): adjacency-aware seeding.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Python fitness always pins quality_daylight to 1.0 (URB_NO_OCCLUSION semantics),
but oracle.py was invoking urb-fitness.pl without the flag, causing outside leaves
to receive real sun-model daylight scores and producing a ~9% gap.
Changes:
- oracle.py: add URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1 to score_batch env
- oracle.py: Score.fail_lines now parses structured YAML failures from the
llm-agent-mcp branch and converts them to plain-text equivalents, so
parity tests can compare oracle vs native failure sets regardless of format
- Regenerated all 36 corpus .score/.fails files with URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1
(no .score files are tracked in git; the script generates them locally)
- All 183 tests pass; closes homemaker-py-gpx
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
When level_fix alone displaces a required room (e.g. t3) it triggers 5
oracle fails for the missing room — far worse than the starting 2 fails,
so lex always rejects it. level_compound_fix atomically: moves the
constrained room to its required floor AND re-inserts the displaced room
by splitting the sibling of the largest C leaf on that floor. The C
sibling is guaranteed adjacent to C (shared parent split), so the
displaced room keeps its required C-adjacency.
On programme-house this jumps the warmstart from 2 fails (l1 wrong
level + t3 size) to 1 fail (staircase volume), which lex accepts as an
improvement and provides a new base for further mutation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Scores .dom files using fitness.Fitness.score_with_fails(), writes .score
and .fails side-cars in the same format as urb-fitness.pl, and respects the
same skip-if-up-to-date / FORCE_UPDATE caching semantics.
Closes homemaker-py-g0b.
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>
Cross-storey equivalent of mutate_retype. Directly addresses
level-constraint failures ("l1 on wrong level") by moving a room type
from one floor to another without changing topology or geometry.
Registered in MUTATIONS at default weight (1.0); no drastic geometry
perturbation so it does not need the reduced level_add/delete weight.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Previously level_add copied the top storey exactly, duplicating all
named programme rooms and immediately triggering space-count failures
for every room on the new floor. The lex outer-search comparison
(-n_fails, score) then always rejected the multi-storey child because
its fail count was far higher than the single-storey parent.
Fix: retype all named-room leaves on the new storey to generic C or O
before admitting the child. The outer search then retypes them
incrementally via the normal retype operator. This allows level_add to
produce designs with the same fail count as the parent (storey_minimum
fail removed, no duplication fails added), making the multi-storey
transition visible to the lex selector.
Result on programme-house cold start (init.dom, 100k evals, 4 workers):
before: 6 fails, single-storey, stuck after 40k evals
after: 4 fails, two-storey, still improving at 100k
Also adds examples/harbor-house/ from urb/examples for future runs.
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>
Bakeoff with native fitness shows NM wins at all DOF sizes: +9% at
child_budget=80 for programme-house (6-7 DOF), and decisively at
harbor-house scale (35-40 DOF) where CMA-ES exhausts its convergence
detector after ~3 generations (46 evals) and adds failures on 12/15
runs. NM uses the full budget, is parameter-free, and has zero new
failures across all test cases.
- Add nm_search() to innerloop.py; change optimise() default to "nm"
- Add nm_search to parametrised test cases
- Add bakeoff_native.py and bakeoff_harbor.py experiments with results
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
