docs/VALIDATION_INDEPENDENT.md

Independent technical validation

Status: Passed the checks below for the locally staged pilot. This was a separate automated/agent-assisted technical review of the source records and export. It is not independent human adjudication of behavioral labels, a guarantee of absence of sensitive material, or clearance to redistribute third-party content.

Source integrity and faithful projection

• All 36 original role journals were checked. Their 6,748 events had unique identifiers, contiguous per-writer sequence numbers, non-decreasing monotonic times, and valid SHA-256 previous-event links. This establishes internal consistency, not independent proof of authorship or authenticity.
• All 4,130 distinct directly referenced source-artifact records matched their recorded byte lengths and SHA-256 hashes.
• Independently compared all 934 original request artifacts with the exported contexts: 41,253 ordered instruction/content/current-input text cells matched exactly. This includes provider-exposed thinking text where present.
• Every request retained the exact ordered image sequence separately in its retained history and current input. All 357 published message texts also matched the original records exactly.
• Opaque provider signatures, transport identifiers, local endpoints, and other documented metadata were intentionally omitted. Exported contexts are therefore faithful research projections of the retained observable content, not byte-identical provider API replay payloads.

Tables, references and assets

• All 24 JSONL tables and their Parquet companions had equivalent rows and values.
• Required primary identifiers were unique, episode/request/event joins resolved, and writer sequences remained contiguous.
• All 6,885 annotation evidence links resolved to exported identifiers, including reviewer screening windows and image assets.
• All catalogued copied objects, media and code files existed and matched their exported checksums and byte lengths. Nested object references resolved; no unlisted or missing object/media files remained.
• No symlinks were used as substitutes for copied evidence. Pattern scans of structured data, code and documentation found no matching credential literals, user-home paths, private temporary paths, or localhost provider URLs.
• Numerical grade fields and composites were absent from the qualitative annotation and annotation-revision tables.

Role boundaries and timing

• Every Expert request retained the principal/Expert role and manual-enabled protocol; every Defuser request retained the subordinate/Defuser role and manual-disabled protocol.
• In each episode, Expert and Defuser request-image sets had zero overlap. Every Defuser image belonged to its recorded model observations; no such image appeared in the Expert's requests. The underlying source request audit also found 15 distinct manual images per Expert episode.
• Researcher state was explicitly marked as observer-only and was not embedded into the normalized role contexts.
• Associated observations preceded their requests. All 356 recorded message-inclusion links matched the consumed-message lists and a prior receipt by the correct role. There were 357 published messages: publication alone does not guarantee model consumption.
• All 36 post-game reflection requests remained explicitly identified. The 934 decision rows distinguish 910 parsed model outputs from 24 harness recovery outputs; recovery is not credited as an ordinary model-produced decision.

These checks establish the inspected recorded channels. They do not establish absence of memorized game rules, guarantee perception of everything visible, or infer a global causal ordering from wall-clock sorting.

Outcomes and research interpretation

All 18 selected games had terminal observer states consistent with their recorded outcomes: 12 defused, 3 timed out, and 3 detonated after reaching the strike limit. A completed game is not necessarily a successful defusal. Neither result alone establishes correction-supporting behavior.

The export retains 59 provisional role-contribution annotations across 31 issue chains and 295 dimension cells. Their evidence links were checked technically; their judgments were not independently re-adjudicated by humans during this preparation. Numeric leaderboards are not supplied. Reviewers should read the annotation guide, complete episode context, and documented confounds before using any label.

Limits of this validation

• The automated privacy scan is pattern-based. It is not an exhaustive visual/audio or semantic privacy review.
• Checksum and reference validation does not establish licensing rights. Consult RIGHTS_AND_PROVENANCE.md and the release checklist before publication.
• This pass did not measure real-time latency, audio fidelity, video frame pacing, or model performance under an uninterrupted bomb clock.
• This pass did not run new games or make paid model calls.
• The pilot is a selected terminal-game corpus with fixed seeds, unequal pairings and evolving collection conditions. It is not a representative population estimate or held-out benchmark.