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 # The gate was measuring the wrong thing
 
-*2026-08-01. Supersedes the correlation threshold used as the project's
-go/no-go statistic since the synthetic world results.*
+*2026-08-01. Retires the correlation threshold that has been the project's
+go/no-go statistic since the synthetic world results, records two replacement
+statistics that were proposed and refuted the same day, and settles on a third
+that survives its controls: an upper bound obtained by giving the solver half
+the correspondence and asking it to recover the rest.*
+
+**Result in one line.** The correlation does not govern recovery in either
+direction; what does is whether a representation can identify scenes at all,
+measured by matching against anchors whose correspondence is given. Visual
+Genome scores 0.291 on that bound against 0.98 for the synthetic world that
+recovers, and its blind recovery is 0.0000 against 0.0039 chance.
 
 ## The correlation does not govern recovery
 
@@ -102,6 +111,60 @@ than everything found (recoverable), tied with what is found (symmetry), or
 shallower than what is found (information deficit). The gate is running on both
 fields; the sections below should be read against this correction.
 
+## Resolution: ask the matching question, and give one thing away
+
+Three statistics failed the same way — fields agreeing on the number and
+disagreeing on recovery — and the pattern in the failures is that each was
+invented by staring at the fields rather than by asking what matching needs.
+The one that works asks directly, with a single concession.
+
+Declare half the scenes anchors and hand over their correspondence. Describe
+every remaining scene, in each modality, by its field row against the anchors.
+Match the two descriptions one-to-one by Hungarian assignment. Nothing is
+searched; the answer is a linear program, and it costs seconds.
+
+This **upper-bounds blind recovery**, because blind recovery must additionally
+discover the anchor correspondence. It held in every field measured:
+
+| Field | ρ | anchor bound | blind recovery | search gap |
+|---|---|---|---|---|
+| synthetic, full | 0.928 | 0.989 | 0.958 | +0.031 |
+| synthetic, noise 0.35 | 0.828 | 0.984 | 0.947 | +0.037 |
+| synthetic, caption omits size | 0.830 | **0.997** | 0.056 | **+0.941** |
+| synthetic, rank 8 | 0.906 | 0.930 | 0.129 | +0.801 |
+| Visual Genome, best | 0.731 | **0.291** | 0.000 | +0.291 |
+| Visual Genome, baseline | 0.656 | 0.195 | 0.000 | +0.195 |
+
+**The bound splits the deficit in two, and the two halves call for opposite
+work.** The bound itself says whether the representation identifies scenes at
+all; the gap between bound and blind recovery says whether the search can find
+what the representation contains.
+
+Read down the table and the three regimes are unmistakable. The two recovering
+fields have a bound near one and a gap of three points — representation good,
+search working. Caption-omission and rank-8 truncation have a bound of 0.93 to
+**0.997** and lose almost everything to the search: the information is intact,
+perfectly so in the omission case, and blind matching cannot reach it. Visual
+Genome is the opposite failure — its bound is 0.291, so **even with the
+correspondence handed over, seven scenes in ten cannot be identified**, and no
+solver improvement addresses that.
+
+This corrects two things I wrote earlier today. The caption-suppression ladder
+does not show information being destroyed; it shows blind searchability being
+destroyed while the information stays. Suppressing a factor makes scenes that
+differed only in that factor interchangeable *under permutation*, which the
+given anchors break and blind matching does not. And Visual Genome's problem
+was never the width of its shared spectrum — it is that a region description
+and a patch descriptor, compared through relation profiles, identify a
+photograph about 29% of the time.
+
+The bound is an empirical upper bound rather than a proven one: handing over
+anchors removes search but also changes the estimation problem. It was not
+violated in six fields spanning the full range of outcomes, and unlike the
+three refuted statistics it separates every case they collapsed. It is now the
+project's cheap gate, and a representation that cannot pass it should not be
+searched.
+
 ## What the shared spectrum measures
 
 Each field is eigendecomposed and the principal angles between the two leading