sots-re/verify/results/saves/certified-pairs.md

Certified pairs — what has actually been shown to reproduce, and under what procedure

determinism-hashes.txt next to this file is a file-hash inventory: it says what a byte string hashed to. It cannot say what was done to produce it, and after 2026-09-09 that distinction is load-bearing. Two findings made it so:

• A pair certifies a procedure, not a state (rule 26(c)). A control that agrees means "no exposed decision was reached on these turns", never "this state is deterministic".
• The route is part of the procedure. The same turn runs one way by continuation and another way after a load, both reproducibly — because a Colonize task alive in the AI agent by continuation is simply absent after a load (lane BS). A hash without its route is not a claim.

So a pair is (input save, procedure, route, outputs, process count, masks). Anything missing one of those columns is an observation, not a certification.

Certified

input	procedure	route	(Autosave EndTurn)	(Autosave)	processes	evidence
ref-turn2.sav ab4ac2d7…	one End Turn	load	bb4fd9ac…	978041ac…	5 + 1	runs A–E; reproduced by lane H after everything changed
ar-turn37-816raiders.sav b6f4e05f…	End Turn, auto-resolve peacefully, End Turn	load	15b99255…	7a8b3d5e…	4	lane AR ×3 hooks=off, lane BS ×1 instrumented
ar-oracle-A-pre.sav 15b99255…	one End Turn	load	33e30092…	4c356f59…	3	lane BQ ×2 hooks=off, lane BS ×1 instrumented

The second and third rows are the same lineage and they do not agree with each other. Row 2's second turn reached by continuation gives 7a8b3d5e…; the identical turn reached by loading row 2's own intermediate save gives 4c356f59…. Both are certified; neither is wrong. This is the load boundary, and it is why the route column exists.

Row 3 is the standalone's first trade-raid pair — one End Turn, no encounter, four raid rolls at one word each.

Masks that must be on the line

• Player.Status (4 → 0 on load) and the derived Summary.Checksum.
• /CD[1]/NPrvVa, which advances by exactly +5.00 across a load and falls on a combat turn. The documented --mask resave rule said "nothing else varies"; that was true of early-game saves with an empty CD[1] diplomacy block and false on these. Lane BQ's probe was unsatisfiable on that leaf alone, before any AI behaviour entered the question.
• Row 3's (Autosave EndTurn) is a resave of ar-oracle-A-pre.sav and differs from it on that one leaf.

Explicitly NOT certified

input	procedure	route	outcome set	why
ad-turn27-two-raiders.sav 1c8baa27…	one End Turn	load	2: e913ff41… ×3, 724528ff… ×2	the fleet-visit-order residue

Five processes across three instrument configurations, no third file, both members reproduced at least twice. The two outputs are bp-pinA-turn28.sav and bp-pinB-turn28.sav, and lane BU showed the difference is the two orderings of two heap pointers: the assignment pass walks a container keyed on fleet->Location, and under LFH randomisation two same-size allocations land in either relative order.

That is not a defect to fix and not a pair to keep hunting for. It is a two-member outcome set, which is what C-set's shape needs, and state_checksum --relabel-new-ids compares across it: IDENTICAL modulo π = {1970↔1986}. The unpinned pair on the same save is refused by that tool and still reports 94 leaves, so the relabelling cannot launder a real divergence.

Do not add a row here on the strength of one agreeing run. Three processes on as-turn15 produced the same bytes on a turn the predicate says is exposed, and a fourth produced different ones — agreement on a single pair proves nothing (lane AP).

Standing rules for adding a row

1. Two fresh processes minimum, and say how many.
2. Run the control before reading anything from an instrumented run, so that if it is a single outcome the 1/k coincidence caveat does not apply (lane AR).
3. Never extend a certified pair by a turn without its own agreement. Row 2's state enters the following turn with ResTNm == '' and is predicted to vary.
4. Record the exposure facts next to the hashes: each AI player's pre-turn ResTNm, NumDes, NumOwn, whether ships completed, and which players actually have an AI client — a save with seven non-human players builds three clients, and the other four carry the signature inertly.
5. When the instrument cannot be removed, pin to a natural run's observed values and require byte-identity with it first (rule 26(d)). That agreement is both the pin's control and a noise mask.

Hashes here are recorded to 8 bytes for readability; the full values are in determinism-hashes.txt and in each lane's findings file.