homemaker-layout/DESIGN.md

homemaker — Design & Plan

Status: validated direction, pre-implementation. Reviewed against the Urb source 2026-06-12; review findings folded in (see §4.5 evidence note, §4.6 throughput arithmetic, §5 decision 6, §6 port-scope expansion, §7 re-scoped phases, §8). Audience: a fresh session that will break this into bd (beads) tasks (note: no beads database exists yet — run bd init first). Self-contained — assumes no memory of the originating conversation.

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1. Purpose

homemaker-layout is a clean-room Python successor to the Perl Urb project (/home/bruno/src/urb). Urb models a building as a binary slicing tree and evolves layouts with mutation + crossover, scored against Christopher Alexander–style pattern fitness. Two long-standing problems motivate the rewrite:

1. It doesn't scale — beyond a few rooms, evolution never finds layouts an architect would consider obvious.
2. Local minima — even small programmes converge to poor optima.

The eventual goal is a 100% Python system. During bring-up, Perl Urb is kept as a throwaway fitness oracle behind the .dom file format.

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2. Constraints that fix the representation

These come from the problem domain and are not negotiable; importantly, they vindicate the slicing tree rather than argue against it:

• Multi-storey with stacked walls. An upper storey retains the storey below, except additional divisions/undivisions. Load-bearing walls must stack ⇒ every cut is a full edge-to-edge guillotine cut. Urb already enforces this via Below-inheritance (an upper quad reads its geometry from the matching quad below).
• Quadrilateral rooms only (no L/Z shapes) — recursive bisection produces exactly this.
• No pinwheel / non-slicing layouts — undesirable for load-bearing construction and adaptability (cf. Brand, How Buildings Learn). This is the one class a slicing tree can't express, and we don't want it anyway.
• Plots are near-rectangular but general convex quadrilaterals (not axis-aligned). Geometry must handle skew; the slicing combinatorics are unaffected.

Conclusion: the slicing tree is the correct phenotype. The rewrite is about the genotype, the search, and the fitness shape — not about leaving the slicing class.

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3. What we built this session (all committed)

Package src/homemaker_layout/:

• dom.py — .dom YAML ⇄ Node tree. Linkage (parent/below/position), wall_outer inset on load with raw-corner stash for byte-perfect round-trip, emit.
• geometry.py — faithful port of Urb's top-down geometry (Coordinate/Coordinate_a/_b/Area/Length) + Coordinate_Offset wall inset. Memoised (uncached recursion is exponential in depth).
• programme.py — parse patterns.config spaces: into per-code size/width/proportion/adjacency/level/count requirements.
• solver.py — bottom-up division-ratio solver (scipy least_squares). (Outcome: falsified as a standalone component — see §4.2.)
• oracle.py — Phase-1 fitness bridge: write .dom, run urb-fitness.pl, parse .score + .fails.

Experiments in experiments/: dump_areas.{py,pl}, resolve_ratios.py, refine_sweep.py, sweep_failtypes.py, optimize_fullfitness.py.

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4. Empirical findings (the core of this document)

4.1 Geometry port — VALIDATED

Per-leaf areas computed in Python are byte-identical to Urb across all 35 programme-house .dom files, including the wall inset and multi-storey wall-stacking inheritance. (experiments/dump_areas.{py,pl}.) The infrastructure is trustworthy.

4.2 Bottom-up area-proxy sizing solver — FALSIFIED

The original hypothesis: give leaves target sizes, solve cut ratios bottom-up, let the EA search only topology. Tested by re-solving an evolved candidate's ratios from programme targets and scoring via the oracle.

• resolve_ratios.py on candidate-002: areas recovered accurately (errors collapsed, e.g. t1/t2/t3 from +1.4/+2.4/+4.8 → ~+0.05), and it fixed the original's size failure — but total fitness dropped (0.00737 → 0.00065, 4 fails) because it introduced shape/relational failures.
• refine_sweep.py (warm-start refine of all 34 candidates): 0/34 improved. Total failures 124 → 297 (equal-offset cuts) and 124 → 626 (independent-offset cuts).
• sweep_failtypes.py (failure-type histogram, equal-offset):

  type	area-dominant Δ	shape-aware Δ
  width	+82	+29
  proportion	+35	+7
  crinkliness	+18	+4
  adjacency	+18	+13
  size	−15	+15
  access	+29	+39
  total added	+173	+110

Why it fails: in Urb's fitness, every cut position is simultaneously a size knob and an adjacency/access/shape knob. A solver that optimises only size/shape is blind to access/adjacency and trades them away. Refining a co-evolved local optimum with a partial objective is structurally unable to win, and the 0.5^n failure penalty makes every new failure catastrophic while fixes are only linear. The proxy solver is strictly worse than optimising real fitness. Do not pursue it.

4.3 "Perpendicular" failures were an artifact — RESOLVED

Letting the two ends of a cut float independently produced skewed cuts and many perpendicular failures. Tying the two ends (equal offset, a == b, one DOF per cut) produces near-perpendicular walls on these near-rectangular plots and yields zero perpendicular failures. Equal-offset cuts are the only mode to use. This also halves the variable count and matches the slicing model.

4.4 DOF / over-determination — partially real, not fatal

A topology with R rooms has ~R−1 cut DOF but ~2–3 size/shape constraints per room, so a fixed topology can be over-determined: you cannot always hit area + width + proportion for every room at once (heavy shape weighting traded straight into size, §4.2 table). This limits any single-objective sizing pass — but it is not fatal, because optimising the full objective still found large gains (§4.5). The earlier "infeasibility" worry was overstated.

4.5 Full-fitness frozen-topology optimisation — VALIDATED ✅

Drive the equal-offset ratios with Nelder-Mead against the real oracle fitness (whole objective, no proxy), topology frozen (experiments/optimize_fullfitness.py):

candidate	DOF	original	optimised	gain	fails
2f45907 (best evolved)	7	0.012617	0.015684	×1.24	2→2
candidate-002 (MCP-refined)	6	0.007375	0.012319	×1.67	2→2
c964435 (MCP baseline)	6	0.003667	0.005836	×1.59	3→3

Every design improved 24–67%, none added a failure. Headroom widens on weaker designs. Because the optimiser sees the whole objective (including the 0.5^n penalty), it never trades into a new failure — the cliff that destroys the proxy solver protects the full-objective optimiser.

Implications:

• There is large, unclaimed geometry headroom above every EA design — even the best. Urb's EA under-optimises geometry: source inspection confirms slide() (Mutate.pm:256-269) re-randomises the cut position uniformly across the span — Urb has no fine-tuning geometry operator at all, which fully explains the headroom.
• A full-objective geometry inner loop is genuinely valuable (the proxy solver is not).
• The EA/search should therefore own topology; geometry is delegated to the inner loop. This is the memetic architecture (§5).
• Corroboration for §4.3: Urb's own mutations use equal offsets (Divide($division, $division)) — equal-offset cuts match how every corpus design was generated.

4.6 Oracle throughput (measured)

urb-fitness.pl scores many .dom files per invocation, so the Perl startup (~0.65 s) amortises across a batch and cached fields (e.g. occlusion) persist. Measured on the 35-file corpus: 0.99 s/dom batched vs 1.65 s/dom for a single-file call. The cost is assessment-dominated (~1 s/dom of actual work), so startup amortisation gives ~40% — useful but bounded.

Consequences:

• Batching only helps when evaluations are submitted together — favour population/parallel-evaluating optimisers (CMA-ES, differential evolution, island EA, pattern search) over inherently sequential ones (Nelder-Mead), both inner loop and outer search, so a whole generation scores in one oracle call.
• Do the arithmetic before scoping topology search on the oracle. §4.5 used ~200 inner evaluations per topology ⇒ ~3 min/topology at 1 s/dom. A run comparable to urb-evolve (pop 128 × 768 generations) is years of oracle time; even 32 topologies × 100 generations with a trimmed 50-eval inner loop is ~2 days. Therefore:
  • The oracle supports Phase 1 fully and Phase 2 only as a small-scale proof (tens of topologies, budgets counted in oracle calls).
  • A native Python fitness is effectively a gate for topology search at any real scale — not merely a later optimisation. (It also brings independence, penalty reshaping, and large programmes.)
  • Warm-starting the inner loop from the parent's optimised ratios (Lamarckian inheritance, §5 decision 6) is the main lever for cutting the per-topology cost — with high-locality moves most cuts survive a mutation, so an order-of-magnitude reduction is plausible. Measure this in Phase 1.

4.7 Occlusion-disabled re-baseline (measured 2026-06-12)

With the §6 descope in place (URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1 patch in Urb), the corpus re-baseline (experiments/rebaseline_no_occlusion.py): all 35 scores change (mostly up, ×1.0–×1.24 — daylight terms pin to 1), exactly one failure-set change (458aa8b8 gains two crinkliness fails — expected mechanism: no shading discount on external wall area), batched oracle ~8% faster (0.92 s/dom). New inner-loop reference gains (deterministic seed, budget 400, accept_innerloop.py bars): 2f45907 0.01304→0.02128 (×1.63), candidate-002 0.00808→0.01373 (×1.70), c964435 0.00400→0.00674 (×1.68, fails 3→2); ~35 oracle calls per topology. All Phase-2+ work uses the flag; flag-off numbers above are historical.

4.8 The 0.5^n failure penalty is a first-order pathology

Multiplicative 0.5^n over failure count (a) makes the landscape a cliff (no gradient across the huge zero-feasibility region), (b) rewards fewer flags over better geometry (the original outscored better-sized solved designs purely on flag count), and (c) is representation-independent. Reshaping it (additive / soft / multi-objective Pareto) is a high-leverage change that helps Urb today and homemaker tomorrow.

4.9 Penalty reshaping decision: lexicographic outer search (measured 2026-06-14)

experiments/penalty_reshape.py, URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1, programme-house.

Inner-loop protection (nm_search, budget 80, 3 files × 3 seeds = 9 runs): All runs show n_fails ≤ x0_n_fails. 0/9 regressions. The 0.5^n cliff in the native fitness scalar is unchanged and continues to protect the inner loop.

Outer-search comparison (budget 3000, 3 seeds, seed = 2f45907):

scheme	seed	best	fails	note
lex	0	0.01781	2
lex	1	0.01793	2
lex	2	0.01785	2
scalar	0	0.01781	2	(same outcome)
scalar	1	0.01890	3	trapped by high-score 3-fail design
scalar	2	0.02632	2	(different topology path)

lex mean: 0.01786 / 2.00 fails. scalar mean: 0.02101 / 2.33 fails.

Key result (seed 1): scalar promoted a 3-fail design whose raw score (×0.125 penalty) beat the pool's 2-fail candidates — exactly the §4.8 pathology. Lexicographic comparison (-n_fails first, then fitness) is immune: any 2-fail design beats any 3-fail design regardless of raw score. Within a homogeneous fail tier both schemes are identical (seeds 0 and 2 agree in serendipitous runs where scalar also stays in the 2-fail tier).

Decision: lexicographic. 0.5^n stays in the fitness scalar (inner loop unchanged). Outer search uses (-n_fails, fitness) as comparison key.

4.10 Deceptive level-fix valley and compound operators (measured 2026-06-14/15)

Context: programme-house, Phase 3 native fitness + Phase 4 lex search, seed warmstart-2f4.dom (best Phase-3 result, 2 fails at score 0.032). Goal: reach ≤ 1 fail, beating the Perl optimiser (2–3 fails).

The deceptive valley. The 2-fail state has l1 (living room, min 27 m², required level 0) on level 1. The obvious repair is level_fix: swap l1 with a leaf on level 0. But every single-step level_fix move creates 5+ new fails because the displaced room (t3, the WC) is dropped into an arbitrary slot that violates adjacency, size, and access constraints simultaneously. The lex comparator (-n_fails, fitness) correctly rejects these — but the result is that the 2-fail state appears completely surrounded by ≥ 5-fail states, and the search stalls. This is a textbook deceptive valley: the fitness gradient points away from the global optimum.

Compound operator. mutate_level_compound_fix (added operators.py) escapes the valley by doing two things atomically:

1. Move l1 to level 0 by swapping it with the largest leaf there (the circulation C node, because C is generic and can absorb the swap without producing a new structural failure).
2. Re-insert the displaced t3 by dividing the sibling of that C node (so t3 lands adjacent to C, satisfying the adjacency requirement).

The new split gets division=[0.25,0.25] (giving t3 ≈ 3.4 m², barely in range) and rotation=0 (t3 on the left, adjacent to the C sibling).

The warm_x0 initialization bug. The compound operator sets specific ratios on a newly-created split node. But driver.py was initialising the NM inner loop from parent.ratios, which has no entry for the new node (it was a leaf). warm_x0 defaulted the new node to 0.5, giving t3 ≈ 6.8 m² — a size fail — so NM started at 3 fails instead of 1. Lex then always rejected the compound child; level_compound_fix was completely invisible to the outer search for ~12 000 evals (until warm_x0 was fixed).

The correct fix distinguishes genuinely-new split nodes from stale hidden nodes that become visible after structural mutations (e.g. swap can flip a b.below pointer, revealing pre-writeback division values from a different topology). Only use the child's explicit ratio for node (li, path) if the matching node in the parent was not already divided; everything else falls through to parent.ratios or defaults to 0.5. Fix in driver.py lines 259–267.

Results (50 000 evals each, pop 8, child_budget 80, 4 workers):

seed	event	eval	fails	score
warmstart-2f4	seed	200	2	0.032
warmstart-2f4	level_compound_fix fires	12 280	1	0.000122
warmstart-2f4	level_retype 0/ll<->1/l	17 880	1	0.00497
warmstart-2f4	final	50 040	1	0.00518
compound3-raw	seed (1-fail hand-built)	200	1	0.000118
compound3-raw	level_retype 0/ll<->1/l	18 360	1	0.00383
compound3-raw	final	50 040	1	0.00523

Perl optimiser reference: 2–3 fails.

The two-C topology breakthrough. After level_compound_fix fires, the topology is: level 0 = ll(l1), lr(t2), rl(C), rrl(t3), rrr(O) — but now l1 is at level 0 (correct) and t3 is adjacent to rl(C) (staircase). However l1 is occupying ll, and rl(C) is the staircase core — so t3-adj-C is satisfied via rl, but there is no second C to satisfy staircase independently. Score ≈ 0.000157 (1 fail).

At eval ≈ 18 000, level_retype 0/ll<->1/l (swap the type of ll on level 0 with l on level 1) creates a TWO-C configuration at level 0: ll(C), lr(t2), rl(C), rrl(t3), rrr(O), with l1 moving to level 1. The score jumps 25× to ≈ 0.005. Why two C nodes work:

• ll(C) (bottom-left, 23 m²) satisfies t3-adj-C via geometric contact at the l/r zone boundary with rrl(t3).
• rl(C) (top-right, 8.5 m²) satisfies staircase adjacency via tree adjacency to rrr(O) (its right sibling when r.rotation=3).

Both constraints are simultaneously met because binary-tree sibling adjacency and cross-zone geometric adjacency provide independent paths.

Why 0 fails is geometrically impossible on this programme + plot. l1 needs min 27 m² at level 0. The only space large enough is ll (≈ 23 m², the entire left half of level 0). Putting l1 at ll removes the t3-adj-C provider. The alternative — dividing ll into lll(l1)+llr(C) — gives llr a proportion of ≈ 6:1 (width ≈ 0.73 m), failing both the proportion and width constraints. 0 fails is not achievable on this programme+plot with a binary slicing tree representation; 1 fail is the geometric optimum.

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5. Validated architecture

Memetic search, full objective throughout:

            ┌─────────────────────── topology search (OUTER) ───────────────────────┐
            │  genome = slicing topology + per-leaf type assignment + per-floor       │
            │           divide/undivide deltas (base floor is master)                 │
            │  operators = high-locality topology moves (see §6)                      │
            │                                                                          │
            │   for each proposed topology:                                            │
            │      ┌──────────── geometry inner loop ────────────┐                     │
            │      │ optimise equal-offset cut ratios (1 DOF/cut) │                     │
            │      │ against the FULL fitness (derivative-free /  │                     │
            │      │ gradient), to convergence                    │                     │
            │      └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘                    │
            │      score = best full-fitness over inner loop                            │
            └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                   fitness: NATIVE Python (fast), reshaped penalty

Key decisions, all evidence-backed:

1. Geometry = inner optimisation against full fitness (§4.5), not an area proxy (§4.2). Equal-offset cuts, one DOF per free branch (§4.3).
2. Search owns topology only. The base-floor tree is the primary genome; per-floor deltas are a small secondary genome (multi-storey constraint as a regulariser, via Below-inheritance).
3. Prefer population/batch-evaluating optimisers so the batched oracle is efficient (§4.6). A native Python fitness (faithful to Urb, validated against the oracle on the 35-file corpus) gates topology search at scale (§4.6 arithmetic); the oracle suffices for the inner loop and a small-scale topology-search proof only.
4. Reshape the failure penalty (§4.8) — additive/soft or multi-objective — so the search has a gradient and isn't dominated by flag-count. Caution: the 0.5^n cliff is what protects the inner loop from trading into new failures (§4.5); reshaping must not lose that property. Candidate resolutions: keep the cliff inside the inner loop only, lexicographic ordering (failure count first, score second), or genuine multi-objective Pareto. Decide in Phase 4 with measurements.
5. Representation upgrade (later): canonical slicing encoding (normalized Polish expression / skewed slicing tree, Wong–Liu) for redundancy-free, high-locality topology moves; bottom-up shape feasibility checks. Defer until the inner loop + native fitness are in place.
6. Lamarckian geometry inheritance. A child topology's inner loop warm-starts from the parent's optimised ratios (cuts that survive the topology move keep their values; new cuts get heuristic defaults). This is the main cost lever for the memetic loop (§4.6) and a standard memetic design choice (Lamarckian vs Baldwinian — we write the optimised geometry back into the genome). Validate the warm-vs-cold speedup in Phase 1.

What we are not doing: the bottom-up area-proxy solver; independent-offset cuts; non-slicing representations (sequence-pair/B*-tree — excluded by §2).

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6. Component plan

component	status	notes
dom.py (I/O + linkage)	✅ done	round-trips byte-perfect; keep
geometry.py (port + cache)	✅ done, validated	the trusted geometry kernel
programme.py	✅ done	extend as fitness needs grow
oracle.py (Perl bridge)	✅ done	throwaway; the validation reference
solver.py (area proxy)	⚠️ keep as artifact	falsified; do not build on it
geometry inner loop	❌ to build	full-objective ratio optimiser (DOF = free branches); batch/population so the oracle batches; warm-start support (§5.6)
topology genome + operators	❌ to build	base tree + per-floor deltas; high-locality moves
search driver	❌ to build	memetic EA / SA over topology; small-scale on oracle, full-scale needs native fitness
native fitness	❌ to build	gates topology search at scale (§4.6); port + validate vs oracle; scope is larger than the term list — see below
penalty reshaping	❌ to design	additive/soft or multi-objective; must preserve inner-loop cliff protection (§5.4)
canonical encoding (Polish expr.)	❌ later	representation upgrade once core lands

Urb fitness terms the native port must reproduce (all couple to geometry): size, width, proportion, adjacency, access/inaccessible, crinkliness, perpendicular, level, staircase volume/count, public access, circulation & outside ratios, min internal area. Source of truth: /home/bruno/src/urb/lib/Urb/Dom/Fitness/ProgrammeDriven.pm and the Storey/ Building/Leaf/Base submodules.

Port scope beyond the term list (found by source review — budget for these):

• Daylight + occlusion subsystem — DESCOPED (decision 2026-06-12). Occlusion is orthogonal to building a scalable optimiser. Instead of porting Urb::Misc::Sun/Urb::Field::Occlusion/CIESky, disable it in Urb behind an env flag (quality_daylight → 1 everywhere; Crinkliness/Area_Outside pins the CIEsky_vertical illumination factor to 1 — simple crinkliness = unweighted external wall area / floor area). The boundary-overlap geometry (Dom->Walls) stays in scope; the sky model does not. The native fitness ports simple crinkliness only; a Python occlusion subsystem is rebuilt post-Phase-5 once optimisation is fully native. Flipping the flag changes every score — re-baseline the corpus, the §4.5 table, and gate bars at one clean boundary, and run the Phase-2 urb-evolve benchmark under the same flag.
• The cost denominator. Fitness is value/cost: per-leaf area costs, interior/exterior wall edge costs, boundary costs (Leaf.pm:194-251, Storey.pm:122-147). Cost couples to geometry too.
• Structural failures not in the term list: "edge too long" (>8 m, two variants), "unsupported covered outside", "covered outside above ground", "level N not connected".
• Missing-space failure stacking (ProgrammeDriven.pm:192-212): a missing space generates 2 base failures plus one per size/width/proportion/adjacency/ level requirement — up to ~7 failures. Penalty reshaping (Phase 4) must preserve this hierarchy or the search will happily drop rooms.
• Two-phase graph build: adjacency/level/vertical checks run on the unmerged tree; graphs are rebuilt after Merge_Divided for storey processing (ProgrammeDriven.pm:83-103). Easy to get subtly wrong; the 35-file validation gate will catch it, but anticipate it.
• Known stub to decide on (fidelity-vs-fix, §8.1): has_vertical_connection (ProgrammeDriven.pm:399-423) matches any leaf of the target type anywhere on the level below — no spatial-overlap check. A faithful port reproduces the bug; decide explicitly.

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7. Phased roadmap

• Phase 0 — diagnostics (done): geometry port validated; proxy solver falsified; full-fitness geometry headroom validated; oracle throughput measured (~1 s/dom batched).

• Phase 1 — geometry inner loop (on batched oracle): full-objective ratio optimiser; use a population/batch optimiser so a generation scores in one oracle call. Reproduce/exceed the §4.5 gains. Integrate as optimise(topology, x0=None) -> (geometry, fitness). Two cheap experiments belong here: (a) warm-vs-cold start — quantify the §5.6 speedup; (b) optimiser bake-off — DOF is only ≈ rooms−1, so batched multi-start pattern search may beat CMA-ES on simplicity; measure, don't commit blind. Gate: match §4.5 gains at materially lower oracle-call budget.

• Phase 2 — topology search, small-scale proof (on batched oracle): base-tree + per-floor-delta genome, high-locality operators, memetic driver wrapping the Phase-1 inner loop. Explicitly small (§4.6 arithmetic): tens of topologies, budgets counted in oracle evaluations, not generations. Compare against urb-evolve from the same seeds/programmes at equal oracle-call budget (urb-evolve has diversity injection/culling baked in, so generations are not comparable). Gate: memetic loop beats equal-budget urb-evolve. Scaling up waits for Phase 3.

  Gate result (homemaker-py-way, 2026-06-13, URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1, budget 2000): experiments/benchmark_vs_urbevolve.py; urb-evolve scores unchanged, memetic scores corrected (patterns.config missing from re-score cwd in first run, fixed in same session).

  seed	system	best@1000	final@2000	fails
  init.dom	memetic	8.84e-10	3.37e-09	18
  init.dom	urb-evolve p16	9.10e-06	9.36e-05	6
  init.dom	urb-evolve p128	4.83e-09	3.27e-05	6
  c964435	memetic	7.65e-03	7.65e-03	2
  c964435	urb-evolve p16	4.00e-03	4.00e-03	3
  c964435	urb-evolve p128	4.00e-03	4.00e-03	3
  2f45907	memetic	2.13e-02	2.13e-02	2
  2f45907	urb-evolve p16	1.30e-02	1.30e-02	2
  2f45907	urb-evolve p128	1.30e-02	1.30e-02	2

  Verdict: 2/3 seeds → REVIEW.

  • Seeded designs (c964435, 2f45907): memetic beats urb-evolve by 1.91× and 1.63×; topology search adds value over the inner-loop-only reference (crossover finds a better topology at eval 372 for c964435).
  • Blank-slate (init.dom): memetic stalls at 18 fails after 2000 evals; urb-evolve reaches 6 fails. The 0.5^n cliff means each fail adds ~2× penalty; 12-fail gap = ×4096. Root cause: single-seed topology mutation chain builds structure one room at a time; urb-evolve's random-population initialisation explores broader topology diversity upfront. Not a regression — this is a scope gap: blank-slate construction is harder than seeded improvement, and addressed separately (random multi-start bootstrap, or Phase 4 penalty reshaping which flattens the fail cliff).
  • The memetic loop is confirmed correct and competitive on the realistic use case (seeded designs). Phase 3 (native fitness) unblocks scaled runs where this gap will also narrow.

• Phase 3 — native Python fitness (gates scaled topology search): first disable occlusion/daylight in Urb behind an env flag and re-baseline (§6 descope note); then port Urb's programme-driven fitness — the §6 "port scope beyond the term list" items (simple crinkliness, cost denominator, structural failures, failure stacking, two-phase graph build). Validate score + failure set against the flagged oracle across the 35-file corpus (float tolerance, identical failure sets). Swap behind the same interface; retire the oracle. Then re-run Phase 2 at scale.

  Gate result (homemaker-py-ccw, 2026-06-13, URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1, budget 20000): experiments/run_search_scaled.py; native fitness only, no oracle. pop_size=16, child_budget=80, seed_budget=300. 71.8 evals/s, 279.8s elapsed.

  programme-house, seed c964435 vs Phase-2 and urb-evolve references:

  seed	system	budget	best	fails
  c964435	memetic Phase-2 (oracle)	2000	7.65e-03	2
  c964435	urb-evolve p16	—	4.00e-03	3
  c964435	urb-evolve p128	—	4.00e-03	3
  c964435	memetic Phase-3 (native)	20000	1.04e-02	2

  Verdict: PASS.

  • Best 1.04e-02 beats Phase-2 oracle run (7.65e-03) by 1.36× and urb-evolve p128 (4.00e-03) by 2.60×; both at 2 fails.
  • Winning topology found at eval 10357 via rotate 1/ll — unreachable within the Phase-2 budget of 2000.
  • Population diverse: 16 members, all at 2 fails (top 15), range 5.99e-03–1.04e-02.
  • Throughput 71.8 evals/s vs ~0.5 evals/s for the batched oracle (≈140× speedup).
  • harbor-house (16 rooms, oracle-impossible): run attempted, results below.

  harbor-house (16 rooms, budget 10000): seed 2b51b05 (best corpus design, 48 fails raw):

  system	budget	best	fails	evals/s
  oracle	—	impossible	—	—
  memetic Phase-3 (native)	10000	3.73e-18	49	15.8

  Search found 3.73e-18 vs seed inner-loop baseline 8.73e-19 (4.3× lift). 638 topologies in 633s. 49-fail landscape: still many fails, but topology search is finding structure (best 3 population members all at 49 fails). The 16-room programme is qualitatively beyond the oracle's capability — this run is only possible with native fitness.

• Phase 4 — penalty reshaping (done, homemaker-py-yg5, 2026-06-14): Decision: lexicographic outer-search comparison (see §4.9). Inner loop unchanged — still uses raw 0.5^n fitness scalar (cliff protection preserved, §5.4). Outer search compares individuals by (-n_fails, fitness): fewer fails always beats more fails; within a tier, compare by score. Implemented in driver.search(use_lex=True). _CHILD_INNER_KW stale sigmas entry also removed (NM default has no sigmas parameter).

• Phase 5 — representation upgrade: canonical slicing encoding (Polish expression) + bottom-up shape feasibility; scale to larger programmes.

Each phase has a concrete go/no-go gate; do not advance on faith.

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8. Risks & open questions (decisions for the next session)

1. Native-fitness fidelity vs simplification. Port Urb's fitness exactly (maximise comparability) or take the opportunity to clean up known issues (the 0.5^n cliff, the t3 width-default contradiction below, the has_vertical_connection no-overlap stub — §6)? Recommend: port faithfully first (bugs included), validate, then reshape in Phase 4.

2. Programme contradictions exist. e.g. t3 (3 m² WC) inherits the 4 m width_inside default (Fitness/Base.pm:60) — geometrically impossible; the original "passes" only by failing size instead. Confirmed in source. Need a sane width default scaled to area, or per-room widths.

3. Inner-loop optimiser choice — RESOLVED (homemaker-py-d0s, 2026-06-13). Bake-off over 3 files × 4 methods × 3 seeds at budget 200 (experiments/bakeoff_innerloop.py), cold-start, URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1:

   method	x@40	x@80	x@200	s/eval	oracle calls	fails+
   Nelder-Mead	1.45	1.50	1.56	2.05	200	0
   CMA-ES	1.09	1.32	1.41	1.69	18	0
   compass	0.71	0.92	1.48	1.69	12	3
   compass-ms	0.71	0.92	0.92	1.44	13	4

   Decision: keep CMA-ES (already the default) for the Perl oracle era. Nelder-Mead wins quality per eval (+x0.15 at @200) but is inherently sequential — 200 Perl invocations vs 18 for CMA (§4.6 batching matters). Compass stalls on narrow-valley landscapes (2f45907: x0.62 vs x1.30) and introduces fail regressions 3/9 runs. Multi-start compass wastes budget on phase splits.

   Phase 3+ note: once native fitness replaces the oracle, oracle-call count disappears. Revisit Nelder-Mead then — its quality advantage is real. Gradient-based (autograd through native fitness) is also an option.

4. Search algorithm for topology. Memetic GA (keep crossover — now meaningful, since a subtree = a contiguous region) vs simulated annealing (the floorplanning workhorse with M1/M2/M3 moves on Polish expressions).

5. Penalty reshaping vs inner-loop protection — RESOLVED (homemaker-py-yg5, 2026-06-14). Lexicographic outer-search comparison (§4.9). Inner loop unchanged.

6. Other continuous DOF are out of scope for Phase 1 — deliberately. Floor-to-floor height is an Urb mutation (Mutate.pm:279-291, bounded 2.7–3.6 m) and feeds cost and stair fit; stair riser/width similar. Cut ratios dominate. Revisit (+1 DOF per storey) if Phase 2 plateaus.

7. End-state confirmed: 100% Python; Perl oracle is scaffold only.

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9. How to reproduce (for the next session)

cd /home/bruno/src/homemaker-layout
# deps: pyyaml numpy scipy (shapely networkx for later phases)

# geometry port vs Urb (must be identical):
for d in /home/bruno/src/urb/examples/programme-house/*.dom; do
  diff <(perl -I/home/bruno/src/urb/lib experiments/dump_areas.pl "$d") \
       <(python3 experiments/dump_areas.py "$d") || echo "MISMATCH $d"
done

python3 experiments/resolve_ratios.py        # proxy solver (falsified)
python3 experiments/sweep_failtypes.py       # failure-type histogram
python3 experiments/optimize_fullfitness.py 200   # full-fitness headroom (validated)

Oracle invocation (see oracle.py): cwd = the .dom's directory (so patterns.config is found), perl -I<urb>/lib <urb>/bin/urb-fitness.pl <file>, env DEBUG=1 to defeat the skip-if-newer cache; reads <file>.score and <file>.fails.

---

10. Key gotchas discovered (carry forward)

• Wall inset: the .dom plot is the outer boundary; Urb insets the root by wall_outer on load (Urb::Dom::_deserialise, Dom.pm:458) and offsets back out on save. geometry.offset_quad mirrors it; dom.py stashes raw corners in node_file. Skipping this makes all areas ~14% too large.
• Multi-storey Below-inheritance: an upper quad's coordinates come from the matching quad below; a cut is "owned" by the lowest storey where its path is divided (solver.free_branches selects these). Walls stack for free.
• Geometry must be cached — the pull-based recursion is exponential in depth otherwise (geometry._cache, cleared on dom.load and after each solver mutation).
• Equal-offset cuts (a == b) ⇒ perpendicular walls, 1 DOF/cut. Independent offsets are wrong.
• 0.5^n cliff dominates fitness; it punishes new failures catastrophically (good for the inner loop, brutal for search gradient).
• Oracle ≈ 1 s/dom batched (1.65 s single; assessment-dominated, startup ~0.65 s amortises across a batch). Submit many .doms per call and prefer population optimisers; native fitness is a later speed/scale win, not a gate.

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11. Phase 6 — topology-search quality for full / multi-storey programmes

Epic: homemaker-py-c4c. Status: scoped 2026-06-17, pre-implementation. This section is the experiment ledger for the epic; each subsection is stubbed now and filled in by the session that runs the experiment (record the command, the numbers, and a one-line verdict, in the style of §4).

11.0 Diagnosis (why this phase exists)

The delivered speedups landed in the two layers that were never the bottleneck. The native fitness (~140× over the oracle, §7 Phase 3) and the geometry inner loop (~1.6×, §4.5/§4.7) both operate within a fixed topology: the inner loop polishes geometry inside a failure tier and, by design, the 0.5^n cliff stops it ever changing the failure count (§4.5: 0-fail-change across the headroom table). But final design quality is dominated by failure count, which is almost entirely a topology property. So faster fitness and better geometry do not move the number an architect would notice.

Topology search on full programmes is the weakness:

• blank-slate programme-house (init.dom): memetic stalls at 18 fails; urb-evolve reaches 6 (§7 Phase 2 verdict).
• harbor-house (16 rooms): out1.dom = 74 fails, generated.dom = 130 fails, both at ~machine-epsilon score; failures dominated by missing-room stacking (each missing room stacks critical + size + width
  • adjacency + level, §6).

Smoking gun: operators.mutate_divide (operators.py:71) types each new leaf at random from programme-codes + C + O. Nothing makes the required programme spaces a constructive invariant, so on a large programme required rooms simply go missing → catastrophic 0.5^n stacking, and the search is a random walk over type assignments with a flat-and-catastrophic gradient in the high-fail regime.

Causal frame for the fixes. The base-floor tree is the master genome; upper storeys are divide/undivide deltas (Below-inheritance); the programme partitions rooms by required level (harbor: 10 on L0, 4 on L1, 2 free). So construction and search should follow the genome's dependency order — credible base floor first, upper floors as deltas, with each floor's required-room set known from the programme. Do not hard-freeze the base when adding floors: that recreates the §4.2 partial-objective trap at the topology level (a base optimised purely as a ground floor can be a bad substrate — the vertical core must stay aligned and load-bearing walls must stack).

11.1 Premise experiment: single-storey harbor (homemaker-py-c4c.1) — DONE

Built examples/harbor-house-l0/ from harbor by retaining only the 10 space codes explicitly marked level: 0 (cr1, ef1, da1, k1, ws1, m×3, la1, st1, me1, of×2 → 13 room instances), pruning adjacencies to the retained codes, and setting single-storey constraints (storey_minimum: 1, storey_limit: 1). The straddling anonymous spaces n/t (no explicit level key) were dropped so the set is an unambiguous single floor. Seeded from the bare plot (init.dom).

• Expectation / decision rule: near-zero fails ⇒ bottleneck is multi-storey coupling (staging is the lever); still stalls (esp. missing) ⇒ per-floor construction itself is the bottleneck (§11.2 required first).

• Command (reproduce):

  URB_NO_OCCLUSION=1 python3 experiments/run_search_scaled.py \
    examples/harbor-house-l0 20000 0 \
    examples/harbor-house-l0/init.dom examples/harbor-house-l0/generated.dom
  

• Result: 20000 native evals across 250 topologies (234 s, 85 evals/s). Best 33 fails, fitness 2.25e-12 — deep in the 0.5ⁿ high-fail penalty regime, with the whole 16-member population stuck at 33–35 fails. The smaller budget-300 smoke run sat at 40 fails; full budget only crept 40 → 33. Not near zero. Fail histogram of the best generated.dom:

  count	category
  13	missing (all 3 m meeting rooms never constructed: required/critical + per-instance size/width/adjacency sub-checks)
  6	adjacency (ws1→c, k1→da1, da1→c, da1→k1, me1→c, la1→c)
  4	access
  4	size
  2	edge too long
  2	crinkliness
  1	proportion
  1	too few stairs — single-storey artifact (staircase_min floored to 1 by the fitness or 1 default; constant across runs)
  33	total

• Verdict: per-floor CONSTRUCTION is the bottleneck, not multi-storey coupling. Even on a single floor with only 13 rooms and zero delta/core-alignment complexity, the search cannot assemble the required room set: the dominant category (13/33 = 39 %) is missing — the counted anonymous space m×3 is entirely absent — and the remaining fails are downstream adjacency/access/size consequences of a room set the mutation operators never managed to construct. This matches the §11.0 prediction's "still stalls (esp. missing)" branch: §11.2 programme-aware construction + missing-room repair is the prerequisite, and staging alone (§11.3) will not rescue it. §11.3 stays blocked on §11.2.

11.2 Programme-aware construction + missing-room repair (homemaker-py-c4c.2)

Stub. Constructive seeder that instantiates each required space (count/level/type) + mutate_place_missing repair operator. Highest-leverage fix for the §11.0 diagnosis.

• Gate: missing-type failures collapse to ~0 across the harbor population; net-fail improvement vs the 74-fail out1.dom baseline; no regression on the seeded programme-house 1-fail optimum (§4.10).
• Result: TODO — before/after fail histograms, numbers, verdict.

11.3 Staged per-floor search (homemaker-py-c4c.3)

Stub. Stage 1: base floor over the level-0 room set (one tree, no deltas) + reserved core + substrate-readiness term. Stage 2: upper floors as deltas seeded with their required room sets, base kept mutable at low probability. Gated by §11.1 premise.

• Gate: staged beats single-stage on harbor at equal native-fitness budget; reserved-core + readiness shown to prevent the bungalow trap (stage 2 does not carve a core from scratch); no programme-house regression.
• Result: TODO.

11.4 Graded high-fail objective (homemaker-py-c4c.4)

Stub. Extends Phase 4 (§4.9). Lexicographic-by-total-count gives ~zero signal when every candidate sits at ~49–74 fails. Add partial credit (proximity per unsatisfied constraint and/or count of distinct unsatisfied requirements) as a secondary key beneath fail-count, preserving the inner-loop cliff (§5.4) and the missing-space hierarchy (§6).

• Gate: measured escape from a high-fail plateau the current lex comparator cannot escape at equal budget; inner-loop 0/9-regression check (§4.9) still clean.
• Result: TODO.

11.5 Topology diversity: structural niching + restarts (homemaker-py-c4c.5)

Stub. Replace the fitness-scalar dedup (driver.py:174) with a topology signature so niching is by structure, not score; add crowding/restarts/islands to match urb-evolve's upfront diversity on blank slate.

• Gate: blank-slate programme-house reaches ≤ 6 fails at equal budget; distinct topology-signature count over time quantified before/after.
• Result: TODO. (Capstone homemaker-py-9gp canonical Polish encoding is the principled long-term signature — (a|b)|c == a|(b|c) collapse — and lands after §11.2.)