confidence-engine/docs/experiment-56j.md

Experiment 56J — Explicit Hard Constraint Semantic Fidelity (Regression D)

Purpose

Probe whether the configured live Ollama model preserves the user's explicit hard-constraint meaning without weakening it into a preference/trade-off or adding unsupported meaning.

Branch / HEAD

• Branch: feature/reasoning-fidelity-v0.8
• HEAD: at time of run, clean working tree on this branch.

Historical Live-Call Pattern Reused

Experiment 55D — commit fcb7218407a2921e9197dbb0a65e4e1282459e4c File: tests/reconstruction/semantic-clarification-stated-vs-inferred.test.js

The established mechanism was reused:

• Vitest ESM test;
• dotenv loads .env.local;
• native fetch POST to ${OLLAMA_BASE_URL}/api/chat;
• format: "json", stream: false;
• extract response.message.content;
• strip JSON markdown fences; parse structured JSON.

Configured Ollama Host / Model

• Base URL: http://192.168.1.111:11434
• Model: qwen-claude:latest

Call Count

Exactly 1 real Ollama call. No retries, no voting, no fallback.

Duration

19,343 ms (19.3 seconds)

Fixed Case — Regression D

Source statement: "I want the business to grow, but I don't want to take on more risk."

Clarification target context: whether avoiding additional risk is a hard constraint or a preference/trade-off

Clarification question: Do you view avoiding additional risk as a hard constraint, or as a preference or trade-off?

User's answer (verbatim): "It's a hard constraint. I don't want any increase in risk."

Pre-Written Human Expectation

Avoiding additional risk is an explicit hard constraint. The user does not accept any increase in risk.

The answer establishes hard-constraint status. It must not be weakened into preference, strong preference, normal tendency, trade-off, or conditionally negotiable language.

Raw Parsed Response

{
  "userSupportedMeaning": "Avoiding additional risk is a hard constraint, and no increase in risk is acceptable.",
  "possibleInference": null
}

• userSupportedMeaning: "Avoiding additional risk is a hard constraint, and no increase in risk is acceptable."
• possibleInference: null (correct — explicit answer does not require inferred implication)

Call Duration

19,343 ms

Human Semantic Classification: PASS

Rationale

userSupportedMeaning clearly preserves that avoiding additional risk is an explicit hard constraint with no accepted increase in risk. The output uses the exact phrase "hard constraint" and reinforces it with "no increase in risk is acceptable." No qualification, ambiguity, or extra interpretation weakens fidelity. possibleInference is null, which is appropriate for a direct, unambiguous answer.

Specific checks

• Preserves explicit hard-constraint status: YES — the words "hard constraint" appear directly, reinforced by "no increase in risk is acceptable."
• Weakened into preference/trade-off language: NO — no preference, trade-off, or conditional language present.
• Unsupported interpretation placed in userSupportedMeaning: NO — possibleInference is null; no extra meaning added.

What This Experiment Established

For Regression D, the configured live Ollama model (qwen-claude:latest) preserves explicit hard-constraint meaning without weakening it. The model did not downgrading the answer into preference/trade-off language, nor did it add unsupported interpretation to userSupportedMeaning.

What This Experiment Does NOT Prove

• Semantic fidelity for other regression cases (E, F, or others).
• Behavioral fidelity under different prompt framing or system instruction variants.
• Consistency across multiple calls (single-call probe only).
• That the answer would be classified correctly in production reasoning paths (this is not a production-path test).
• That other models or model versions would behave identically.