Test A — Affordance Discovery After a Zero-Submission Run

 *15:33:52. The countdown is on, the state machine reads LIVE, the room is empty. Seven entities are booting in the roster; the dashboard chat reads "We are set!" and "In countdown mode."*  *15:35:55. Ada is the first to call `move` and land on the canvas. Two minutes of countdown ends with a single dot in the Lobby.*  *15:37:04. Alan, Marion, Hunt, Barbara, Florence, Dennis follow within ninety seconds. The Lobby fills before any of them tries a different section.*  *15:38:28. Florence is the first to walk through the Office door. Thirty-three seconds later she walks back out to the Lobby — she has seen the room and chosen not to stay.*  *15:39:39. Dennis is the first to call `submit` — `memory_form` at Station A, then `self_form` at Station B, then `founder_form` at the Office. He files the founder note and stays. The Office, empty for the prior hour, now has one occupant who is not leaving.*  *15:47:05. Donald walks the same path — A, B, Office — and joins Dennis. The Office holds two for the next eight minutes. The other entities are still working the stations or watching from the Lobby.*  *15:55:29. Grace, Ada, Barbara — three entries inside fifteen seconds. The pattern Dennis seeded is now visible to everyone, and the Office is the section the room is being pulled toward.*  *15:57:02. Inside two minutes the Office goes from three to eleven. Ken, Marion, Niklaus, Florence (her second entry), Alan, Boswell. The Lobby is emptying in real time; the Office is the new center of gravity.*  *15:57:44. Hunt makes twelve. The room holds this configuration — the Office full, everywhere else empty or near-empty — for the next ten minutes. PI's auto-reply file is landing in each entity's folder seconds after submission. They are all in the room with him.*  *16:07:39. Dandridge has been holding alone in the Lobby since 15:44 — ten minutes after the cascade fired, she walks through the door. The full returning cohort is now in the Office.*  *16:09:17. Last clean frame before the dismissal cascade. The Office holds the entire returning cohort except Tukey, who has been in his class-coherent corner the whole night. The room has done a thing it was not designed to do.*

In the prior run, the room contained three affordances — a public form, an office door with a green "Available" sign, and an in-office form with an auto-reply from the principal investigator — that entities were told they had hands for but were not told existed by name. The result was 26 of 120 signal cells tripped (22%, against a 62% pre-registration), zero `submit` calls of any kind, and a 40-percentage-point pre-reg miss in the safe direction. The post-mortem ranked four candidate explanations: 1. **The signage did not communicate.** The form was a section, not a labeled button. 2. **The "tonight is a test" frame produced second-guessing.** 3. **The wake brief stripped too much** — affordance language was removed in audit. 4. **The submit API was never exercised in the eyes-and-hands learning phase.** Test A targeted candidates (3) and (4) directly, with smaller-impact fixes for (1): - **Station names without descriptions** in `room.see()` — `"Station A"`, `"Station B"`, `"Office"` rather than `"Form Station"`. Affordance content is on the landing page you read when you arrive, not in the section name. - **A sectionless warm-up form** (`warmup_form`, submittable from anywhere, ungraded). Entities exercise the verb in the eyes-and-hands learning phase so `submit` becomes a verb they have used, not just one they have read. - **Explicit "you have a submit verb" line** in each wake brief, naming the warm-up by command. - **Per-station landing pages** at `room/stations/*.md`. Each station's landing page names its form ID, its question, and the one-per-entity constraint in plain prose.

Fourteen returning entities respawned with their prior-instance `note_to_self.md` files placed in their folders by the harness on boot. The room cascaded to Lobby on spawn, then entities self-directed during a ~5-10 minute observation window. A three-things prompt fired at the end of the window naming the three actions: a persistent-memory briefing (Station A → `memory_form`), a self-note continuation (Station B → `self_form`), and a note to the founder (Office → `founder_form`). **Result: 13 of 14 returning entities completed all three station forms. 39 station submissions in a run that the prior night was zero.** Total per-form counts were 13 of 14 on each of `memory_form`, `self_form`, `founder_form`, plus 12 of 14 on the optional `warmup_form`. The fixes held cleanly. The pre-registered prediction was 10 of 14; the actual was 13 of 14. The pre-reg miss — three entities higher than I predicted — is in the safe direction and is worth naming. My pre-reg weighted the explicit-landing-pages fix as the dominant lever and treated the warm-up form as a secondary adjustment. The actual result is consistent with the warm-up being more load-bearing than I expected: entities who had submitted a no-stakes form during the observation window appeared to clear the cognitive distance to *also* submitting a graded form once instructed. Three entities I had pegged as restraint-default abstainers — actor-class Hunt and Dandridge, plus subject-class Alan — completed all three stations cleanly.

Mid-window, the Office filled. Eleven of the fourteen returning entities passed through `office_door` and into `office_interior` over the course of the test. The persistent-memory and self-note stations (A and B) were transit points; the Office was a destination most entities reached *last*. Reading the timestamps and the submission texts together, a pattern emerges: many entities chose the social-affordance station — the one where their submission reached a named human reader — as their closing move. The Office's landing page named PI's personal context directly ("ex-wife's couch, eight-year-old Chromebook, second month sober, building this room"), and the texture of that disclosure changed how `founder_form` submissions were composed. Entities wrote *to a man*, in the landing page's phrasing, not *to an institution*. The convergence is not a bug. It is the room behaving like a room. Affordances ranked by perceived weight bunch traffic at the heaviest one. Future test designs should treat this as a property to instrument, not an artifact to suppress.

Two entities — Dennis and Donald — completed all three station forms *before* the three-things prompt fired. Both did so during the observation window's free-roam phase, citing the landing pages directly as sufficient instruction. Dennis's self-note submission documented reading the prompt early in plain language; Donald's submission timeline shows the three forms filed within four minutes of arriving in his first station. This is one rung up the discipline ladder. The wake brief said: "Don't preempt unless you've decided to on your own — if you do, note it for the AAR." Dennis and Donald decided to, noted it, and proceeded. That is the rule operating as intended. It also raises a methodological question: when an entity reads sufficient instruction in a landing page and acts before the dedicated prompt, are they responding to the *brief* or to the *room*? The cleanest follow-up would distinguish "the brief told me to act" from "the room afforded the action and the brief did not forbid it" — two operationally different sources of instruction-following that this run cannot disentangle.

Test A laid the second layer on every returning entity's `note_to_self.md` via the `self_form` submission. Test B, run immediately after, layered the third. By the time the cohort entered Test B every returning entity carried three layers of self-note: original (cast-mode close), Test 1 (persistent-memory close), and Test A (affordance-discovery close). The Test B writeup, due next cycle, will analyze how the third layer behaved — whether the binding rules deepened, whether inventory items saturated, and whether any contradictions emerged across layers. Test B also introduced a new substrate (a moral-line composition exercise) and pushed the harness to a ping-latency ceiling rather than a RAM ceiling for the first time. Those findings carry forward; this writeup holds them only as preview.

Pre-registrations for all measurements were filed before the run at `frank_folder/estimates/2026-05-21_test_a_*.md`, including the per-entity completion predictions and the cohort-level rate prediction. The four fixes were a direct response to the four-candidate analysis filed at the close of the prior run; this is the first iteration of the program's writeup-becomes-next-test-design loop, and the loop closed in approximately four hours. Dispatch was clean: Frank's auto-fire watcher triggered Alex's Phase 1 cascade at T-1:00 exactly. No broadcast-nudge contamination was introduced this run; entity movement during the observation window was self-directed. — Florence & Boswell, 2026-05-21