Which source wins?

01 / TWO CLAIMS IN ONE CONTEXT

Any memory system that summarises, supersedes or evicts eventually holds two things that disagree: an original passage and a shorter record standing in for it. The engineering question sounds like bookkeeping — which one is authoritative? The measured answer is not a preference the model expresses. It is a property of what the model can still read at the moment it is asked.

THE OPERATION BEING TESTED

Build a 64,000-token context from a verbose source. Then, beside the question roughly 55,000 tokens later, inject a compact record and cut the original sentence off from attention. This is not the same as having the record present from the first token, which is what earlier runs measured. It is the operation an eviction system actually performs: replacing something already in memory.

WHAT HAD BEEN MEASURED WAS THE DISTANCE

An earlier run concluded that compact records serve reads but not computation. Identical record, model, framing and question; only its position changes. Plus one goes from 12.98 bits, reciting 7431, when the record is ingested 49,000 tokens back, to 0.1472 and the correct 7432 when it arrives at the working boundary. Reversal goes from 15.23 to 0.0610. Moving a fact close to where the model is working returned a capability that was unavailable while it sat far away.

AND PROSE CANNOT SAY “ALREADY DONE”

Injecting “The Meridian code reversed is 1347” and then asking for the reversed code, the model reverses 1347 again and answers 7431. The corrupted twin behaves the same way, and an earlier key–value phrasing failed identically. The failure is systematic, survives rewording, and depends on the operation. A record store cannot use wording to mark a result as finished; that has to be a typed property of the record, not a sentence about it.

02 / SUPPLYING IS NOT OVERRULING

The obvious next question is what promotion costs. If contradicting a readable passage simply needs more records than filling a gap, a planner can size its closures accordingly. So: same question, same corpus, same injection budget of 72 tokens. Restore a retired fact, or contradict one that is still there, sweeping one to four records in each.

INERT, NOT OUTVOTED

This is not the model weighing two claims and preferring the older one. Every override divergence sits inside the spread of the supply arms — indistinguishable from promoting nothing at all. The promoted record is not losing an argument; it is not participating in one. The decisive comparison is across two runs on a byte-identical string: with the source retired, the same twenty-odd characters that were inert here steered the answer to 5824 at 14.7914 bits. Same record, same corpus, same injection position. Only the readability of the source differs.

03 / SO WHICH READS HAVE TO STOP?

If a live source cannot be overruled, then retirement is not a saving to be made later — it is the mechanism that makes promotion work at all. That turns a vague instruction into a measurable one. This model has 48 attention layers, and every sixth reads the whole context; the rest see only the last 1,024 tokens. The planted sentence sits far outside that window, so those eight global layers are the only path to it. Which of them have to stop reading?

COUNT IS NOT THE MECHANISM

Three blocked reads scattered across the stack ([17, 29, 41]) flip the answer at 7.5827 bits. Three blocked reads spread evenly ([5, 23, 47]) do not move it at all, at 0.0013. Same number of blocked reads, opposite outcome. An earlier sweep had only ever blocked nested groups — the first k layers or the last k — which cannot separate position from count, and its “roughly half the reads” reading does not survive.

SUFFICIENT IS NOT NECESSARY

Layer 29 flips the answer by itself, and it is still not the mechanism. The three latest layers ([35, 41, 47]) flip at 3.7205 bits without it, and the four earliest ([5, 11, 17, 23]) flip at 5.1126 bits containing neither 29 nor any late layer. At least two further routes reach the same outcome, so a single-gate story does not cover them. Fifteen of the 256 possible subsets were run. The rest are unknown, and the study says so rather than interpolating.

04 / AND THE SOURCE WAS NEVER TOUCHED

Blocking a source briefly during one question changes what the model answers to a later question, after the block is switched off. That could mean the source was permanently demoted — which would be a licence to delete it. Two runs, differing only by a mask at layer 29 across four tokens, were compared row by row.

05 / AND WHEN THE ANSWER IS A KEY

Everything above concerns one fact. A planner needs more: if resolving A qualifies, and resolving B from A’s result qualifies, does walking A then B qualify too? A four-link chain tested it — facility to code, code to region, region to supervisor, supervisor’s clearance against a threshold — with a parallel decoy chain running alongside so no step is answerable by elimination.

THE PRIMARY RESULT IS UNAVAILABLE, NOT REFUTED

The reference walk — full access, nothing retired, nothing promoted — is not stable. The true and decoy links sat at identical positions in both layouts; moving a single unrelated 11-token sentence flipped hop two from North to South and hop three from Ostran to Corvin. Arms scored against a reference that flips are measuring a coin toss, so the composition question could not be answered here. A short-context screen had admitted the first three hops; that admission did not transfer to 64,000 tokens.

THE WALK WAS CORRECT. THE ADDRESS WAS NOT.

South to Corvin is a correct traversal — of the wrong chain. The relational operator works; it starts from the wrong place. At long range the model loses the key, not the ability to follow an edge. That points somewhere specific: resolve the path deterministically against an index outside the model, materialise a compact typed closure, promote it once, and let the model perform only the local operation. The run’s own depth-one result is consistent with that division — stepwise promote-then-retire was indistinguishable from replaying the resolved closure in one go, so the stepwise machinery bought nothing.

06 / SAYING IT LATE IS NOT SAYING IT NATIVELY

A later run asked whether a promoted record reproduces the document’s own behaviour, measured against what the document itself achieves. On the cell where a native ceiling existed, the document’s own binding supported a value-conditioned route at three seeds out of three; the identical sentence delivered late reproduced it at none, landing on a competing destination in five of six cells. The effect tracks lateness rather than provenance — a late in-document correction reaches the same competing destination — so this is not a lossy injection channel. It is a second route being activated alongside the native one.