H1: The Composition Hypothesis — Refinement Log
Session 3 identified stigmergy as the cross-scale mechanism; Session 4 got independent confirmation from Smith & Bedau (1997); the 2026-07-27 code review withdrew sim03 as support (its organization lattice is static by construction) and reclassified H1 as untested by our own sims rather than confirmed.
Topic: multi-scale composition — the missing mechanism in stalled ALife simulations
Refinement (Session 3)
The cross-scale interaction mechanism is stigmergy. Agents modify their environment (stigmergic traces), and those modifications persist and constrain future agents. The environment mediates between scales.
Refinement (Session 4)
Smith & Bedau (1997) independently confirmed this hypothesis through empirical study of Echo. They found Echo lacks "the diversity of hierarchically organized adaptive aggregates" and proposed that the missing CAS property is "robust, open-ended emergence of hierarchical, adaptive structures."
Refinement (2026-07-27, post code review — evidence base narrowed)
H1's substance is unchanged, but one of its supports is withdrawn. sim03 was cited as confirming that fixed networks stall; it cannot, because its organization lattice is fixed at construction and identical at every generation of every run (see ../../simulations/REVIEW.md §4). Smith & Bedau remains the external support, and it is strong. Our own simulations should now be described as not yet having tested H1 rather than as confirming it: sim04 establishes only that a finite species space exhausts (510/510, unaffected by the fixes), and sim05 — once its measurement defects were corrected — shows composition succeeding in 2 of 6 pairs, which is mild evidence against the strongest reading of H1 rather than for it. The hypothesis stands on the literature and on the absence of any counterexample, not on our results.