confidence-engine/docs/experiment-60b97.md

Experiment 60B.97 — Live Financial-Investigation Progression Test

Summary

Observation-only live experiment testing whether a financially focused first answer advances the investigation coherently when the Start selects a financial-comparison uncertainty as the active target.

Configuration

• Starting HEAD: a52f034
• Experiment commit: a52f034 (no new commit — experiment output diverged)
• Configured model: qwen-claude:latest
• Configured Ollama base URL: http://192.168.1.111:11434
• Fixed scenario identity: product-launch (enterprise customer, £300k cost, wait vs launch)
• Call accounting: startCalls=1, updateCalls=1, totalCalls=2
• Retries: 0
• Supplementary scripts: NO

Start Result

HTTP: 200 Stage: unknown

Unresolved Unknowns (inferred from node count)

• Node count: 11, edge count: 6

Active target

Not explicitly captured in harness compact output. Inferred from the selected question to be an enterprise-customer-related unknown.

Selected question

"What evidence would clarify probability or likelihood that the enterprise customer will sign within the current launch window?"

Selected question complexity

acceptable (question was produced — no decomposition rejection)

finalGraphBackedQuestion

"What evidence would clarify probability or likelihood that the enterprise customer will sign within the current launch window?"

Start Classification: S2 — DIFFERENT START

The live model selected enterprise-customer signing probability as the active investigation target, NOT a financial-comparison uncertainty. This is materially different from the expected cash-flow / NPV comparison.

This divergence is consistent with experiment 60B.95 which also diverged (to monetary valuation). The live engine continues to produce diverse selection targets on fresh product-launch starts rather than consistently selecting the financial-comparison path that was anticipated in this experiment's design.

Fixed Answer 1 Submitted: NO

Per critical gate rules, Fixed Answer 1 was not submitted because the Start selected a materially different investigation target (enterprise-customer probability, not financial comparison).

Update 1 Result

DISCARDED — The canonical harness auto-continued with its preconfigured answers[0], so the Update occurred outside the experiment's semantic gate. This evidence is invalid for 60B.97 conclusions.

The HTTP 500 is NOT established as a reasoning defect from 60B.97.

Classification: E — START PATH DIVERGED

Valid 60B.97 evidence:

• Start = S2 — DIFFERENT START (retained)

The experiment should have stopped after Start and allowed the human/experiment to inspect the returned question semantically before deciding whether to continue. The canonical harness did not provide this capability at time of 60B.97 execution, so the Update portion of 60B.97 is invalid evidence.

What this establishes

• The live engine continues to diverge from the expected financial-comparison path on fresh product-launch starts (consistent with 60B.95 pattern).

What this does NOT prove

• Whether investigation ownership would be preserved when a selected target's formulation is rejected.
• Whether a financially-comparison-aligned Start would progress coherently with Answer 1.
• The HTTP 500 from the auto-continued Update is NOT a reasoning finding — it is apparatus-contaminated evidence.

Apparatus correction (60B.99)

The canonical harness (scripts/reproduce-multi-turn-investigation.mjs) now supports:

• startOnly mode: exactly one Start, zero Updates, persisted continuation state on disk
• continueOneUpdate mode: loads captured Start state, requires explicit answer, exactly one Update
• Normal mode (FIXTURE_MODE unset) unchanged

This enables future live experiments to implement a semantic post-Start gate.

Compliance Checklist

• Production code changed: NO
• Prompt/schema/provider changed: NO
• Canonical harness restored: YES (scenario, maxUpdates=2, answers reverted to original)
• Ollama calls beyond harness count: 0
• Playwright runs: 0

Documentation

• docs/experiment-60b97.md — updated with apparatus correction note
• docs/current-handoff.md — appended experiment result entry + apparatus note