H10: The Unbounded Space Insufficiency Hypothesis — Refinement Log

Refinement (2026-07-27, post code review — H10's primary evidence was substantially an artifact)

A construct-validity audit of the simulation code (../../simulations/REVIEW.md) found three defects in sim05's L2 test, each biasing against coexistence: (1) species identity was not alpha-invariant, so the same lambda term under different bound-variable names counted as distinct species — inflating species counts and deflating every set intersection; (2) outcomes were classified on Jaccard similarity, whose arithmetic ceiling fell below the 0.15 coexistence threshold for two of the six pairs, making coexistence undetectable for those regardless of dynamics; (3) the mixed population was padded almost entirely from organization A, handing it a roughly 9:1 abundance advantage under mass action — which is why all six pairs originally returned dominance by the lower-indexed run.

With all three corrected, sim05 gives 2/6 coexistence (33%), 3 dominance, 1 mutual destruction, stable across survival thresholds 0.45–0.70. The "0/6, dominance and mutual destruction are the only outcomes" claim originally reported does not hold.

H10 is weakened but not refuted. Coexistence remains the minority outcome, so unbounded space still looks insufficient on its own, and the independent evidence (Mathis et al. 2024; Fontana & Buss 1994) is untouched. But "L1 organizations do not compose" was too strong — in this model they compose about a third of the time. The "three paths, same failure" convergence argument (Echo, chemical organizations, AlChemy all fail at composition) should be read with that in mind: sim05 is now a weaker leg of it than when written. Note also that sim05 never tests closure or self-maintenance, so its "L1 organizations" are surviving species sets rather than organizations in the COT sense — an independent reason to treat this evidence as softer than originally stated.