Follow-up to the previous commit: user flagged that quality_width/
quality_proportion's "stricter of both" (max target, min sigma) combination
for a fused leaf's two codes was an ad hoc hack. Tried two more principled
alternatives and A/B'd all three against the harbor-house/health-centre
example programmes (20k evals x 3 seeds each):
1. stricter-of-both (original) -> health-centre +24.5% worse
2. precision-weighted Gaussian product -> health-centre -13.9% better
3. mixture (max of two Gaussians) -> health-centre +20.4% worse
Landed #2 (fitness._gaussian_product): combining two Gaussian evidence
sources about the same quantity via precision-weighting gives an
intermediate target with a narrower spread, unlike the naive max/min hack.
#3's building block (_clipped_gaussian) is kept, documented, and unit-tested
as a recorded negative alternative -- somewhat counterintuitively, the more
philosophically appealing "let the leaf collapse toward whichever code fits"
mixture model was empirically worse, because max() lets a leaf score 1.0 by
satisfying only the weaker of the two codes' targets.
multi_use stays default OFF -- the precision-weighted result improves both
example programmes on average but isn't the clean sweep needed for a
default flip (harbor-house loses 1/3 seeds). DESIGN.md §33 rewritten with
the full three-way comparison.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01R8agJBT2ZpmF3ErW7wi2wY
Bruno Postle
e37930605e