item 27 pre-registered: zero-pause internal band looping — single M=10 in-place burst at prompt end, iteration-aligned lens targets, ii0 inference ablation; carry_steps gains inplace updates, trainer gains --inner-iters/--base-pauses

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

results-loop/PROTOCOL_UNIFIED.md

@@ -732,3 +732,29 @@ auxiliary supervision, A2, E2-N.
     generation" in the free-running sense) is NOT this — that's a
     rollout-based follow-up (latent DAgger) if either lens arm moves.
     Job: scripts/jobs/zzz_r_rungb_lg.sh.
+
+27. **Internal band looping, zero pause tokens (pre-registered
+    2026-07-17 ~01:10, before running; Nils's clarified structure,
+    option A confirmed via question: one silent burst before output).**
+    Architecture: NO pause tokens anywhere — sequence is prompt +
+    visible output only. After the k=2 prompt settle, the last prompt
+    position runs M=10 IN-PLACE band iterations (s^i seeds from the
+    position's own previous band output — carry_common inplace
+    updates), then generation proceeds with the normal single-pass
+    carry under the visible tokens. Vertical thought burst instead of
+    a horizontal pause tape: iterations leave no KV entries — only
+    the final state survives, a true internal loop (the C'-flavored
+    architecture the ladder never tested; every prior rung bought
+    compute with positions). Supervision: lens-CE iteration i <->
+    deleted-step token i (λ=0.3, the stable value), same d=1 deletion,
+    warm-start rung-A e400, 200 steps, seed 0. Eval n=256: 0:0
+    (sanity), 2:0 with --inner-iters 10 (matched), 2:0 with
+    --inner-iters 0 (ablation: does the burst matter at inference?).
+    References: positional d=1 31.6 (same ±5 / >36.6 bands) and the
+    ii0 ablation cell (isolates the burst's causal contribution).
+    Honest priors: item 25's 2:12 just landed at 31.2 (flat), so the
+    write-vs-compute dissociation likely carries over; the
+    architectural deltas that could matter here: no attention-tape
+    (forces state-borne computation rather than KV re-reading) and
+    anchor-at-prompt (iterations see the full settled question).
+    Job: scripts/jobs/zzz_s_rungb_ii.sh.