14 — Organ ablation matrix & triage verdicts (Sprint 3 / S3.1 + S3.2 + S3.4)

Pre-registered 2026-07-02 (human-approved sprint setup, before the runs). Status: TESTED-METRICLESS-NULL (2026-07-11).

Outcome (2026-07-11): TESTED-METRICLESS-NULL. Campaign 0d48130 (kaggle CPU-only, commit 2a22049): the M2B additive-organs run (--seeds 3) exited 0 after 11,786.6 s but emitted no METRIC or ASI values. No effect estimate or positive/negative mechanism verdict is available beyond the registered metricless null — the harness completed but produced no scored output. This is distinct from a scientific null (which measures zero effect) and from a refutation (which measures a negative effect). Evidence: ../experiments_logs/2026-07-11_campaign_0d48130.md.

Agents running this experiment MUST NOT edit this spec; deviations are reported as deviations. Depends on research/11's minimal organism being merged; the S3.1 harness (src/oczy/experiments/organ_ablation.py, merged 2026-07-01) provides the subtractive matrix.

Problem

Five organs (NeuralHippocampus-at-answer-time, WorldModelCritic, IdentityHypernetwork, SkillImmuneCortex, ExperienceAutoencoder) plus two retrieval components (DSI DifferentiableFactIndex, scope-slot reranker) ride along in every full-organism run. The code audit found most have no trained parameters or no wired output. Nothing may be kept on vibes: every component either moves a held-out behavioral metric on the frozen eval or is archived.

Design — two complementary matrices, both on frozen eval v2, holdout split

M1 (subtractive, existing harness): full OrganismAgent minus one organ at a time via the off-switch config, organ_ablation.py, real driver, ≥5 seeds (pre-registered fallback 3 if >15 min/seed, reported as deviation).

M2 (additive, the decisive one): research/11's MinimalOrganism plus one component at a time. A component only earns a place through M2; M1 alone cannot save it (full-stack interactions can mask dead weight).

Both matrices report per-stage holdout accuracy mean±CI (oczy.common.stats) with the vanilla column, plus the S2.3 drift triple where steering is involved.

Per-component pre-registered predictions (from the code audit — the run

confirms or refutes; predictions cannot bias scoring)

Verdict rule (fixed now)

For each component, with Δ = (with − without) holdout accuracy, mean over seeds, on the stage(s) the component claims to serve and on the all-stage mean:

• KEEP (wire to tensors, research/15): Δ > 0 with 95% CI excluding 0 on at least one stage AND all-stage Δ ≥ 0.
• RETRIEVAL-BASELINE: same as KEEP but the component is a retrieval path (hippocampus-at-answer, DSI, reranker) — kept, but labeled as the retrieval baseline in every future table, never counted as metabolism.
• ARCHIVE: CI includes 0 on every stage (dead weight), or all-stage Δ < 0 with CI excluding 0 (harmful). Archived under attic/ with a one-page post-mortem (S3.4); autonomous sessions stop touching it.

No middle category. A component that "almost" helps is archived; it can return by winning a future pre-registered experiment.

Reporting

Both matrices (component × stage tables, mean±CI), verdict per component with the rule applied mechanically, archive list, model id, commands; log to experiments_logs/2026-07-02_s3_organ_ablation_matrix.md quoting this spec.