These two project scratch documents had stale BP=0.609 and DFA=0.308
references from the pre-v2.31 era. Updated to the matched 30-ep 3-seed
values that v2.31-v2.32 corrected:

  BP no-pen 30ep:  0.609 → 0.585 ± 0.001
  BP+pen 30ep:     0.530 → 0.532 ± 0.006
  DFA no-pen 30ep: 0.308 → 0.301 ± 0.005
  DFA+pen 30ep:    0.363 → 0.360 ± 0.001
  Gap math:        +5.5/-8 → +5.9/-5.3 pp; +18.1/+1.4 → +18.3/+1.1 pp
  Deep cos:        +0.155 → +0.151

Now the paper, the protocol library, the README, the helper scripts,
and the project scratch docs all agree on the v2.32 values.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

§4 updates per round 20:
  - Soften 'confirmed' to 'strongly supports'
  - Add §4.4 BP+penalty capacity-cost control with the round 20 phrasing:
    'lower bound on residual gap under matched architecture/data/optimizer/
    penalty, after accounting for the penalty's direct capacity cost in BP'
  - Add multi-seed lock-in to §4.3 (24 measurements all near zero)
  - List 5 independent validations supporting the converged framing

The §4 narrative is now complete and the framing is locked.

After the round 19 disambiguation experiment confirmed hypothesis B
(penalty CREATES deep alignment, not just reveals it), the paper §4
needs to use the new framing:

  Mode 1: measurement degeneracy via terminal LN gradient cancellation
  Mode 2: low intrinsic credit-direction quality of random feedback

Both modes are direct-measured (mode 1 by diagnostic (b), mode 2 by
per-layer cos in the meaningful regime). The penalty partially
alleviates BOTH modes. Neither is fully fixed.

§4 rewrite includes:
  - The two modes (4.1)
  - Penalty causal validation with 3-seed cos (4.2)
  - Disambiguation: vanilla early-epoch cos table proving hypothesis B (4.3)
  - Why the residual gap is partial alignment (4.4)
  - Why this framing is paper-cleaner than prior ones (4.5)

Walk-back chain extended to 7 entries, with 6 and 7 happening same-day
and converging on the final two-distinct-modes framing.

Comprehensive paper draft outline for the NeurIPS 2026 E&D submission:

§1 Discovery-first hook (round 16 narrative arc): broken eval -> evidence
   -> metrics miss -> need protocol -> validation
§2 Audit findings: 5-method × 3-seed audit, walk-back details, EP internal
   control
§3 The diagnostic protocol: 4 diagnostics, decision-utility ablation,
   threshold sensitivity (with (d) fragility flagged), temporal validation,
   cross-architecture validation, sub-mode discrimination
§4 Two failure modes: mechanism story + causal penalty rescue, with the
   round 18 softening (partial dissociation rather than full separability)
§5 Pipeline pitfalls catalog: 7 bugs (incl. new #6.5 self-cosine fallback)
§6 Reference implementation
+ Limitations / walk-backs section listing all 5 walked-back claims explicitly

This is a working draft to make the next writing step concrete. Reflects
all evidence collected through the round 18 follow-up.