Correction, same session: the width statistic does not survive its control

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>

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 11 deletions

diff --git a/CANDIDATE_REGISTER.md b/CANDIDATE_REGISTER.md
index e4aa235..bcfa3a0 100644
--- a/CANDIDATE_REGISTER.md
+++ b/CANDIDATE_REGISTER.md
@@ -5,24 +5,28 @@
 The register used to be ordered by how much each candidate was expected to
 raise the field correlation, because correlation was the go/no-go statistic.
 That statistic has been shown not to govern recovery: a synthetic field
-truncated to rank 8 correlates at 0.906 and recovers 13%, while the same field
-at rank 16 recovers 96%. **The target is now a pair — the correlation and the
-width of the shared spectrum — and candidates are ordered by which one they
-move.**
+truncated to rank 8 correlates at 0.906 and recovers 13%, while independent
+noise that drops the correlation to 0.743 leaves recovery at 71%. Two
+replacement statistics were then proposed and both failed their own controls
+(see `RANK_RESULTS.md`), so **there is currently no cheap predictor and
+candidates have to be scored by running the search.** Rows below keep their
+width measurements because they were taken, not because they predict anything.
 
 Status is one of: **done** (measured, number recorded), **running**,
 **queued** (specified, not started), **open** (idea, not specified),
 **closed** (measured and eliminated).
 
-Current position: correlation 0.731, shared directions 15, against a
-recovering synthetic reference at 0.928 and 26.
+Current position: correlation 0.731 and recovery 0.0000 against 0.0039
+chance, versus a synthetic reference at 0.928 and 95.8%.
 
-## A. Widen the shared spectrum
+## A. Widen what the two corpora share
 
-The binding constraint, and the one only identified today. Both modalities are
-individually rich — vision effective rank 40, text 48 — and agree on 15
-directions. Candidates here are judged on the shared count, not the
-correlation.
+The live constraint, though the quantity that expresses it is not yet
+identified. What is established by intervention: suppressing one factor from
+the synthetic captions takes recovery from 96.4% to 5.6% while the correlation
+stays at 0.830, and five separate encoder-side interventions move neither
+recovery nor any width measure. Candidates here are judged by whether they
+change what the two corpora are about.
 
 | Candidate | Cost | Status |
 |---|---|---|