tied-alpha outcome: all predictions confirmed; free B causally isolated as fidelity culprit

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

results-loop/PROTOCOL_UNIFIED.md

@@ -244,3 +244,15 @@ prompts. Free-ACT via state-cosine therefore yields no early exit at this
 threshold, and no ACT-like difficulty allocation falls out for free —
 output-level halting signals would be needed. Paper's dynamics claims
 softened accordingly.
+
+--- Outcome, item 14 (scored 2026-07-15): ALL THREE PREDICTIONS CONFIRMED.
+(a) Fidelity fully preserved: easy 93.4/91.0/90.2 at k=2/4/8 (merge:
+92.6/88.5; parcae with identical decay freedom but untied B: ~71%) —
+the free B is causally isolated as the fidelity culprit, the anchoring
+tie as the protection. (b) Hard at merge level exactly (35.7/42.9/39.3 =
+merge's k-curve within noise); no gain from the freedom. (c) Learned a
+essentially unmoved: mean 0.298, range [0.285, 0.310], 0/1536 dims moved
+>0.05 from init — the anchor coefficient is not a useful learnable DOF;
+hand-tuned 0.3 was already optimal. Recipe consequence: fixed-alpha
+anchored merge is the recommended design; learnable-alpha safe but
+pointless, learnable-B harmful, per-depth strands the gain.