Two rises far apart
Worth reading first: The organ that was taken away · Where a handover sits.
Two things happen on a rung as the rise falls. The two contact steps change places — the family with the shorter hop across the surface becomes the other one. And somewhere, the family a wrecking cut leaves standing changes.
The claim this thread rests on is that those are not the same rise. It has been tested on bands, where the ordering is known to a sweep step and the changes to a bracket. On one rung it can now be tested with both quantities located to a single step of the grid the rises are named on.
The two numbers
The hops cross between 0.00804 and 0.00803, found by walking all 378 rises of the rung and evaluating hop lengths, with no cut stems at all.
The survivor changes between 0.00640 and 0.00639, found by cutting twenty rises across two grids — eighty-nine cut stems and seven minutes.
Both are brackets one step of the hundred-thousandth grid wide. Neither is interpolated, neither is a sweep step, and neither is a bracket that had to be widened because something was silent.
How far apart they are
One hundred and sixty-four steps of the grid. As a ratio in the rise that is 1.2564; as a share of the rung’s whole span in the logarithm it is 45 per cent.
The rung runs from 0.00947 to 0.00570. The crossing sits 33 per cent of the way down it and the survivor’s change at 78 per cent, so the two are separated by nearly half the rung.
Both are located to one step and the gap is 164 steps, so the separation exceeds the sum of the two uncertainties by a factor of eighty. That is not a comparison that needs care.
Why this is a better test than any band
A band holds the lattice still, which is what makes it the right object for asking whether the survivor changes with nothing else moving. What it cannot do is locate a change against a handover, because a change is only bracketed between two rises at which its offset wrecks, and on one of the three bands cut whole that bracket is a hundred and eight grid steps wide.
A rung is looser about the lattice and tighter about the location. Across this stretch the settled divergence moves two tenths of a degree, four times a band’s tolerance — so a change anywhere in it could in principle be the lattice changing.
What makes the reading safe is that the divergence is held across the step: the two rises either side of the transition read 99.2578 degrees identically, and the counted pair is 7/11 on both.
What the bands had said
Nineteen located changes on the golden 8/13 band, none at its handover, sitting seven to fifty-seven rises below it. Zero changes on the Lucas 7/11 band. Two changes on the golden 5/8 band, one of them flagged at its handover and bracketed across twenty rises.
That is a strong negative with a soft edge. The nineteen are located to a rise of a band’s own sweep, which is two parts in a thousand — coarser than the grid, and they are all on one band.
This rung’s reading is a single case with a much harder edge, and it is on a different branch and a different pair from the band that carries the nineteen.
What sits at the crossing
The census’s own row. The lattice the census holds on this rung is at 0.008, which is four grid steps below the crossing, and it is the nearest any census row comes to a handover.
Its cuts keep 7 — at offsets 5, 6, 7 and 8 — and 7 is the longer of the two hops there, because the crossing is above it and the 11 has already taken over as shortest.
So at the rise nearest the crossing the cut keeps the longer hop, which is the claim that the shortest hop is not the survivor at its least comfortable point.
And what sits at the transition
Nothing in the geometry. At 0.00640 and 0.00639 the shortest hop is 11 on both sides, the ratio between the two shortest lengths is 1.0695 and 1.0704, and both numbers are where the smooth curve says they should be.
The 11 has been the shortest hop for 164 grid steps by the time any cut keeps it. That is the sentence the round set out to write, and it is a negative: the ordering is not what moves the survivor.
If the ordering were the actor, the survivor would change at the crossing. It changes at about a third of the rung further down, in a stretch where the ordering has been settled and unremarkable throughout.
The account this eliminates
The rung has a second kind of handover in it. That was the possibility the round was opened to test: that a cut keeps the shorter hop with a lag, and the survivor’s change is the ordering’s change arriving late.
A lag would be a mechanism — a stem whose pattern holds an old ordering for a while — and it would predict the two rises to be near each other. They are not near each other by any measure the rung offers.
So the survivor’s change is not the ordering’s change, delayed or otherwise, and the census’s decisive negative does not have to be read against a second handover.
What is left unexplained
Everything about why the survivor changes where it does. The transition at 0.00640 has no geometric marker: the divergence is smooth through it, the hop lengths are smooth, the ratio between them is smooth, and the counted pair is constant across the whole rung.
What changes there is which offsets wreck — offset 9 starts wrecking and keeps 11 — and the wrecking set is itself a quantity that moves from rise to rise with nothing continuous behind it.
So one discrete quantity is explained by another discrete quantity and the chain stops there. That is where this thread’s explanations have stopped before, and saying so is more useful than a story.
Two quantities, two costs
The geometry costs one grown stem per rise and closed-form arithmetic: 378 rises in three minutes. The cutting costs two grown stems per offset per rise: 20 rises in seven minutes, for a twentieth of the coverage.
That ratio is why the two are known to the same precision here only because the cutting was aimed at a bracket somebody had already narrowed. A blind sweep of the rung at the grid would be 378 rises of cutting, which is about two hours.
The design that made this affordable is: search coarsely, find a bracket, refine inside it. It is the same shape as the three sweeps that located a slot losing a wall, and it works because the quantity turned out to change once.
What a second rung would be worth
A great deal, and there is one place to get it. The golden 8/13 rung is the only other rung whose pair carries a number a cut could keep off the smaller member, and no golden lattice on this ladder keeps 13 or 11 — the survivor ranks second or worse by hop length at every golden rise on a rung.
So the second instance is not available. The comparison of two located rises can be made on one rung of one branch, and nowhere else on this ladder.
That bounds the finding rather than weakening it. One case with both quantities located to a grid step is worth more than several with one of them bracketed, and it is what there is.
The recorded handover
The ladder records this rung’s handover at 0.00800 rather than at 0.008035, because the ladder sweep steps by a ratio and 0.00800 is the nearest rise it visits.
That is 0.44 per cent of the rise away, and it changes nothing here: 0.00800 is 160 grid steps above the transition where 0.008035 is 164, and both are enormous compared with the one-step brackets.
It is recorded because a rise used in a comparison should be a rise somebody has located, and until the walk nobody had.
What the claim now rests on
Nineteen located changes on one band, none at that band’s handover, at a resolution of two parts in a thousand. One rung with both rises located to one part in a hundred thousand and 164 steps apart. One band with no changes at all and one band unable to test it.
That is a stronger base than the previous round’s, and the strengthening is in kind rather than in count: the rung’s reading is the first anywhere that does not depend on the sampling of either quantity.
It is still one rung, one branch, one counted pair.
The shape of the negative
Worth stating plainly because negatives are easy to overread. The claim is not that the ordering never matters to a cut. It is that the rise at which the ordering changes is not the rise at which the survivor does.
Those are different, and the first is a much larger claim. The ordering is one of four accounts of which family survives and it is not the one that wins, but it is not scored at zero either.
What this rung shows is that on it, the two events are 45 per cent of a rung apart. It does not show that the ordering is irrelevant to what a cut keeps.
Why the two events were ever expected to coincide
Because the two families in question are the same two. A handover is the two contact steps exchanging which is shorter; a survivor is one of those two families being the one the wrecked run holds rigid. It would be odd if the ordering of two things had nothing to do with which of them survives.
The expectation was never that they coincide exactly. It was weaker and harder to refute: that the survivor is decided by the ordering, so that a change in one implies a change in the other somewhere near.
That is the version this rung refutes. The ordering changes at a third of the way down the rung, the survivor at four fifths, and there is no candidate for what carries a dependence across 164 steps of the grid.
The alternative the census already refused
The census’s own result is stronger and cruder: the family a cut keeps is not the shorter of the two, scored over thirty wrecked cuts on ten lattices. Fourteen of the thirty keep the longer hop.
That refutes the shortest hop survives outright. What it does not refute is the softer reading — that the shortest hop matters and something else overrides it — and a coincidence between the two rises on a rung would have been evidence for exactly that.
There is none. So the census’s negative and this rung’s separation are two independent refusals of the same family of accounts, one over lattices and one along a rung.
What is being compared, exactly
Two rises, and they are rises of different kinds, which is worth naming.
The crossing is a property of the intact stem. It is computed from the divergence a stem settles to and the rise, with no organ removed anywhere, and it exists at every rise of the rung whether or not a cut there would wreck anything.
The transition is a property of the cut stems. It exists only where a removal wrecks, and the set of offsets that wreck moves from rise to rise. So one of the two quantities is defined everywhere and the other is defined on a scatter.
That asymmetry is why the transition took eighty-nine cut stems to locate and the crossing took none, and it is why this comparison is possible on a rung and awkward on a band.
The number 45 per cent
A share of the rung’s span in the logarithm of the rise, which is the only measure that compares across rungs — a rung at the coarse end covers a factor of 1.5 in the rise and one at the fine end a factor of 1.7, and a difference in rise means different things at the two.
Forty-five per cent is large by any reading. The six bands on this ladder cover 3 to 72 per cent of their own rungs, so the separation here is wider than four of the six bands are.
Put another way: the transition is outside the band built around the crossing. The band around this handover runs from 0.00922 to 0.00721, and 0.00640 is well below its fine end — so a sweep of the band could never have found the transition at all.
Which is why the band said nothing
The Lucas 7/11 band was cut at every one of its 124 rises and not one offset changes its answer anywhere on it. That was reported as a clean negative and it is one.
What this round adds is where the change actually is: eighty-one grid steps below the band’s fine end. So the band’s silence was not a band with nothing in it; it was a band that stops above the interesting rise.
That is a useful thing to know about band sweeps generally. A band is defined by the divergence staying still, and there is no reason a survivor’s change should respect that definition.
What both numbers being located changes
Every earlier form of this comparison had one side known well and the other known badly. On a band the ordering is read at the band’s own sweep step and the changes are bracketed between rises at which an offset wrecks — so the answer was always these are not near each other, qualified by as far as either can be placed.
Here neither qualification is needed. Both rises are bracketed between two consecutive members of the grid the ladder names its rises on, which is the finest resolution anything on this site has, and the gap between them is 164 of those steps.
That is the difference between a negative and a measurement. The claim was never in much doubt; what it lacked was a case where the doubt could be quantified, and this is that case.
And what it does not settle
Whether the ordering matters to a cut at all. This rung says the two events are far apart; it does not say the shorter hop is irrelevant to which family survives.
The census answers the stronger form of that separately and negatively: fourteen of thirty wrecked cuts keep the longer of the two hops, so the shortest hop survives is refused outright. What is left is a softer reading in which the ordering contributes something and is overridden, and neither the census nor this rung can measure a contribution that is always overridden.
Measuring it would need a case where everything else is held and only the ordering moves. A band is exactly that object and there are three of them cut whole, which is why the band design exists alongside this one.
What is claimed
That on the Lucas 7/11 rung the two contact steps change places between 0.00804 and 0.00803 and the family a cut keeps first includes the larger member between 0.00640 and 0.00639; that both are located to one step of the grid the ladder names its rises on; and that they are 164 steps apart, 45 per cent of the rung’s span.
That the separation exceeds the sum of the two locations by a factor of eighty, so the comparison does not depend on how either was measured.
And that nothing in the geometry marks the transition: the divergence, the pair and both hop lengths are smooth through it, and what changes there is which offsets wreck.
What links here
Computed from the collection, not written here: the essays that point at this one.
Shares its objects with
Essays that name at least two of the same things, and that neither author linked.
- Every rise of a band — both name ablation, claim testing, handover, honest limits, measurement, negative result, resolution, rigid hop, rung
- The alternation is not a period — both name ablation, claim testing, handover, honest limits, measurement, negative result, resolution, rigid hop, rung
- The offsets that never change — both name ablation, claim testing, handover, honest limits, measurement, negative result, resolution, rigid hop, rung
- Three offsets, three crossings — both name ablation, claim testing, handover, honest limits, measurement, negative result, resolution, rigid hop, rung
- A family that is a multiple — both name ablation, claim testing, contact family, honest limits, hop length, negative result, resolution, rigid hop
- The third band, cut whole — both name ablation, claim testing, contact family, handover, honest limits, negative result, resolution, rung
Named objects
A flat tag is an object no other essay names yet.
AblationClaim testingContact familyHandoverHonest limitsHop lengthMeasurementNegative resultResolutionRigid hopRungTransition