# QUINCUNX Corrected-Instrument Replication (CIR) protocol — registered

**Date:** 10 August 2026. **Status:** REGISTERED, NOT ACTIVE — activation is the
operator's call (it authorizes real spend: a full instrument audit plus one
re-execution of the EDR battery). Nothing here modifies the frozen EDR verdict set,
the bundle, or any published grade.

**Provenance.** The operator challenged the orchestrator's "blindness is
non-renewable" position: operational blindness in an LLM-orchestrated system is
context-blindness and is renewable for executors; and objectively faulty feedstock
(wrong vocabulary ids, misread markup semantics) should simply be fixed and the
battery re-run. The orchestrator's revised synthesis and the operator's challenge were
stress-tested by GPT-5.6-sol
(docs/generated/quincunx_rerun_consult_20260810.md, verbatim). The consult's ruling —
AMEND: publish the original run now; permit exactly one tightly governed
Corrected-Instrument Replication, which is not and can never be a second blind test —
is adopted in full. Its centre line:

> Renewed executor blindness licenses clean execution of a corrected instrument; it
> does not license calling that instrument's result a new blind confirmation.

## 1. What the CIR is and is not

The CIR re-executes the frozen EDR rival battery with an audited, repaired instrument
layer. It addresses MEASUREMENT VALIDITY. It is not independent confirmation, not a
second blind test, and not a replacement result: the original registered run retains
priority as the blind test, permanently. The record never retroactively calls the
original run "alpha" — it is the original registered run with subsequently identified
instrument defects; the defect ledger, not a version label, carries that fact.
(Rationale, adopted from the consult: an "alpha" label makes the one run that carries
the blindness rhetorically disposable.)

## 2. Fix admissibility — three classes

- **A0 — mechanically entailed conformance repair.** A fixed, versioned external
  specification permits exactly one answer, and the repair changes neither construct
  nor estimand (e.g., a demonstrably wrong vocabulary identifier against the
  authority's own table; parsing `<supplied>` per the EpiDoc spec; a transport
  ceiling that violated the registered lossless-ingestion requirement). Only A0
  repairs enter automatically.
- **A1 — standards-constrained interpretation.** The authority narrows but does not
  determine the mapping (e.g., collapsing *Cultual* or *devotionis causa* into a
  binary funerary/votive construct). A1 changes require outcome-blind adjudication
  under a rule registered before adjudication; unresolved cases produce NO CHANGE or
  PARK, never a discretionary pick. Auditor consensus does not convert an
  underdetermined choice into an objective fact.
- **B — analytic or construct choice.** Thresholds, bands, weights, proxy meanings,
  aggregation, multiplicity, and any mapping whose answer depends on the study's
  construct. FROZEN, without exception. A proxy does not become Type A by being
  "validated" — if no defensible external gold label exists, the proxy is a
  measurement model and its analysis PARKS rather than being tuned (condition 12).

## 3. The audit that precedes any fix-list

Detection-selection (outcome-triggered fault-noticing is outcome-correlated even when
every fix is correct) is controlled — never erased — by a predeclared, complete
source-to-verdict audit:

- A hashed manifest covering every node: schemas, fields, joins, filters,
  denominators, deduplication, lookup tables, semantic proxies, serialization,
  truncation, coercion, aggregation, output formatting — registered BEFORE the audit
  begins, and certified by a separate clean auditor as covering the whole dataflow
  rather than the anomaly-derived fix list.
- 100% of lookup entries and 100% of observed raw values audited bidirectionally,
  including unmapped values, duplicate mappings, unreachable entries, and reverse
  coverage against the authoritative vocabulary (version-pinned).
- Lossless round-trip and boundary tests for every transported field; zero silent
  truncation, coercion, encoding loss, or cardinality drift.
- Every semantic proxy: a public-seed probability sample across every corpus,
  proxy-positive/negative class, and rare stratum; independent coders blinded to
  alpha outcomes and machine labels; gold-label codebook, power calculation, accuracy
  and cross-corpus-invariance margins registered before any label is inspected.
  Stringent gate (registered here as the default): 99% lower confidence bounds for
  sensitivity and specificity above 0.95, and a 99% upper bound on between-corpus
  difference below 0.05. Failure ⇒ the affected analysis PARKS.
- Every manifest item ends in exactly one disposition: PASS, documented REPAIR, or
  affected-analysis PARK. "We found no more errors" is not a completeness criterion.
- "Same standard" means the same construct definition and authority version, the same
  inclusion rule, mapping algorithm, ambiguity and missingness treatment, sampling
  probabilities, error margins, and conflict-resolution rule — applied identically
  regardless of corpus, result direction, or threshold consequence.

## 4. Execution conditions (all binding)

1. Prospective designation as Corrected-Instrument Replication, with §1's scope line.
2. The original run, its emitted verdicts, the known-defect ledger, this protocol,
   and an UNCONDITIONAL commitment to publish the corrected run regardless of sign,
   tally, or apparent quality are deposited BEFORE the replication executes.
3. Raw corpus snapshot, eligibility universe, estimands, and registered verdict
   definitions: frozen, unchanged from the original run.
4–5. Every proposed change classified A0/A1/B with reasons; all B frozen; A1 per §2.
6–7. Audit manifest hashed before the audit; authorities, versions, crosswalk rules,
   ambiguity rules, and conflict hierarchy frozen.
8. Audit and adjudication lanes receive sealed, allow-listed bundles — no alpha
   outcomes, no verdict documents, no outcome-revealing repo history or directional
   rationales; their accessible files, model/version, and settings are recorded.
   LLM-dependent steps use a fixed checkpoint predating publication with retrieval
   and network disabled, or explicitly disclaim model-level independence.
   Deterministic code is the official executor wherever the frozen rules permit —
   model discretion stays out of the measurement step.
9–11. Full-domain bidirectional lookup audits; schema/join/denominator/missingness/
   serialization/round-trip tests; semantic-validation frames per §3 — all completed
   and dispositioned before the fix ledger closes.
12. Any analysis whose proxy fails validation, or whose correction is not uniquely
   externally entailed, PARKS. No tuning-until-pass.
13. The public fix ledger (defect, authoritative evidence, affected code/data,
   classification, disposition — never a desired result) CLOSES before execution.
14. Code, data, dependencies, prompts, model/version, configuration, thresholds,
   weights, multiplicity rules, and the execution bundle: frozen and hashed. No
   unlisted change rides along.
15. Execution environment stripped of outcome documents and repo history; retrieval
   and network disabled.
16. Exactly ONE official execution. Mechanical void/crash conditions registered in
   advance (the A7 precedent); no re-run may be triggered by an unexpected but valid
   result.
17. The complete delta output is pre-registered: every intermediate quantity,
   denominator, threshold distance, robustness state, verdict transition, and
   common-support comparison.
18. Corrected output + full delta publish on a fixed timetable. Defects discovered
   after execution are disclosed, not repaired in this run — they belong to a later
   version, preferably on a fresh corpus.
19. The publication states explicitly: the original run retains priority as the blind
   test; the corrected run addresses measurement validity, not independent
   confirmation.

## 5. The Corrected-Instrument Delta

Registered name for the published difference: corrected minus original, for every
registered intermediate quantity, threshold margin, robustness label, and verdict —
with underlying values and distance-to-threshold, never a bare changed-verdict count;
common-support and total-population deltas both reported if eligibility moves. What it
is NOT (stated wherever cited): an unbiased estimate of typical feedstock error; a
global sensitivity analysis; evidence that each correction moved results toward truth;
an independent test of the garbage-in-becomes-verdicts thesis. It illustrates that
thesis; the fix bundle was outcome-triggered and its components may interact.

## 6. Sequencing (adopted ruling)

Publish the original registered run NOW — the both-publish commitment removes the
binary selection problem, and holding would leave softer selection channels open
(timing, prominence, framing, abandonment) while obscuring the chronology of error
detection. The CIR publishes later as a linked, versioned result; an optional final
synthesis presents both. Publication of anything remains gated on the operator's
explicit word, as always.

*Registered by the orchestrator; consult incorporated in full; activation awaits the
operator.*
