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>
Bruno Postle
3c8f7aba07