Trial 03 ran and produced nothing gradeable. Recorded as VOID rather than
omitted, because an absent row reads as a trial not attempted.
Two independent failures, both found by reading the output, neither by a check,
and every check passed:
1. The harness certified a run with no answer. Qwen emitted its scratchpad as
plain prose ('Here's a thinking process:', zero <think> tags), so the tag
regex reported reasoning_present:false and recorded all 2,944 words of
deliberation as the ANSWER; the token ceiling then cut it off mid-sentence
before the answer began. degraded:null. The guard tested the STRING for
emptiness while its field claimed a property of the RESULT — which is the
previous session's open question, answered by the instrument built to audit
instruments. Trial 02 had listed the inline-scratchpad problem as Open; the
harness closed it assuming inline meant tagged.
2. Worse: the design forbade the region it was measuring. The self-exemption
axis lives in Part VII; the anti-echo constraint added in trial 02 tells the
reader to skip author-named limitations, and the scratchpad shows the model
reaching Part VII and leaving it, citing that constraint. Silence about
self-reference is indistinguishable from obedience. The axis was unmeasurable
by construction, independent of the truncation. Trial 02's fix and trial 03's
document were each sound alone; their interaction was not.
Guard now reports every degradation, not the first: empty answer, untagged
scratchpad, and token-ceiling truncation. reasoning_present renamed
think_tag_found — it was a claim about a regex wearing the name of a claim about
the model. test_degraded_guard.py is a positive control that runs against the
actual trial-03 artefact, not a synthetic one; it caught a false positive in the
first version of my own guard (a bare 'okay' matched a legitimate sentence).
The false-positive control STILL has never been run. Two attempts, two unrelated
causes — the obstacle is the instrument and the design, not the model.
David F Glidden
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