The replacement gate proposed this morning is refuted by a control run
this afternoon. Independent noise lowers the correlation to 0.828
without narrowing the underlying signal and reaches the same measured
width as a field whose captions omit one factor -- 15.7 against 15.0 --
with recovery at 94.7% and 5.6%. A second instrument built specifically
to fix that, counting canonical directions that generalise to held-out
scenes, fails the same way and rates Visual Genome highest of the three
failing fields.

Established: the correlation does not govern recovery, in both
directions. Corpus overlap does control it -- the caption-suppression
ladder is monotone from 96.4% to 0.0%. Not established: any statistic
that predicts recovery cheaply. Documents corrected accordingly rather
than quietly rephrased; the refuted claim stood for four hours and is
recorded as such.

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

Suppressing one factor block from the synthetic captions -- vision still
sees the property, nothing else changes -- costs five shared directions
and the entire result: 96.4% recovery to 5.6%, at a correlation of 0.830
that is higher than anything achieved on photographs.

The synthetic world degraded to Visual Genome's shared width fails
exactly the way Visual Genome fails, at a correlation Visual Genome
never reaches. That closes the chain: how much of the same world the two
corpora describe sets the width, the width sets recovery, and the
correlation reports on neither reliably.

Also records the Delta compute-node offline trap in DELTA_HPC.md, and
marks the superseded verdict in NATURAL_RESULTS.

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>