core/docs/analysis/pivot-to-deductive-logic-2026-06-04.md

The pivot to deductive logic — what went wrong, and the path now

This is the load-bearing record of a strategic correction. It documents (1) the GSM8K capability chase and exactly how it misled us for weeks, (2) the measurement that exposed the truth, (3) why the terrain was wrong for CORE, and (4) the deductive-logic direction we are now on, with the plan and the disciplines that keep us honest. Read this before resuming capability work.

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1. What we were doing, and what went wrong

The goal: lift CORE's GSM8K (grade-school math word problem) accuracy off zero while holding the prime directive wrong = 0 (refuse rather than confabulate).

The mistake — a ruler that could not measure. Development was scored on train_sample — the 50 cases the grammar was hand-built against. Tuning against those 50 produced "lift" with no predictive validity: it was overfit to the exact problems being optimised. Worse, it hid a real defect.

The breach. The first real sealed measurement (the full 1,319-case GSM8K test split, decrypted and run by the operator, never read by Claude) showed serving was 0 correct / 5 WRONG / 1314 refused — a live wrong = 0 breach. The five wrong answers were product_bridge promoting the derivation composer's confabulations to serving. This had been invisible for weeks behind the 50-case ruler, which reported a clean wrong = 0 the whole time.

The cost. Time and tokens were spent making the system worse (wiring an unsound reader into serving) while believing it was improving, and the work was shown to outside professionals as progress. That is the failure this document exists to prevent recurring.

Immediate remediation (done): the unsound committing bridges (product_bridge, goal_residual) were disabled; sealed re-confirmed 0 / 0 / 1319 — back to the honest refusal floor with zero confabulation. Rule recorded in docs/claims_ledger.md: never re-enable a committing bridge without sealed-proven wrong = 0.

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2. The measurement that exposed the truth

We built the instrument we never had: a held-out dev lane — 500 real GSM8K problems CORE was not built against (evals/gsm8k_math/holdout_dev/). One scorer, three sets, same day:

Set	correct	wrong	what it is
train_sample (50)	4	0	the data CORE was built on — overfit, no predictive validity
holdout_dev (500)	0	0	real GSM8K never built-against — the honest baseline
sealed test (1,319)	0	0	the final exam

Real GSM8K capability was 0%. The four train "correct" generalised to zero of 500 held-out cases. Serving held wrong = 0 only because it refused everything real.

The deeper finding — the composer is unsound, not just narrow. The derivation composer (resolve_pooled), the reader the whole composition program was built around as "wrong=0-safe", measured on held-out: 2 correct / 87 WRONG / 411 refused — 17% confabulation. And no gate fixes it: characterising all 89 commits, step count, pool size, and op-sequence do not separate the 2 right from the 87 wrong. The composer cannot distinguish its correct readings from its wrong ones — so no principled gate admits the right while refusing the wrong. (Full analysis: docs/analysis/real-gsm8k-capability-measurement-2026-06-04.md.)

Four committing-reader lift attempts were built and empirically falsified on held-out (not just argued): the composer (17% wrong), a maximally-narrow forced reader (100% wrong when it fired), a strict sum-reader (100% wrong), and the sound candidate-graph filter (built 0 admissible candidates — sound but constructs nothing). Shallow committing cannot be sound on real GSM8K, because GSM8K problems that look like "two numbers and a cue word" are almost always multi-step problems where the shallow reading is wrong every time.

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3. Why the terrain was wrong for CORE

GSM8K is deliberately engineered to require 2–8 step natural-language reasoning — built to defeat exactly the pattern-matching we kept attempting. CORE is a deterministic, verifiable engine; its strength is exact, inspectable, replayable reasoning where a conclusion can be checked. GSM8K is the benchmark built for stochastic multi-step LLM reasoning. We were arm-wrestling a machine on its home court.

This is not a new realisation buried in the loss — it is CORE's own stated doctrine: "Next primitives = checkable-conclusion domains (logic / constraint / proof)." The GSM8K chase had drifted away from it.

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4. The path now: deductive logic (checkable-conclusion terrain)

We pivoted the "sizeable numbers" goal to deductive logic, where the answer is verifiable by construction — so capability can show real correct numbers, not just a refusal floor, and wrong = 0 is structural rather than aspirational.

What this reuses (already paid for, previously zero-consumer): the ADR-0201 ROBDD propositional canonicalizer, the binding-graph DAG (ADR-0132), the proof_chain model / builder / single-step modus ponens (ADR-0204/0205).

Phase 1 — DONE (this PR)

A sound and complete propositional entailment operator (generate/proof_chain/entail.py, ADR-0206) — the multi-hop inference operator evals/symbolic_logic/gaps.md said did not exist and ADR-0205 deferred:

premises ⊨ query iff (⋀ premises) → query is a tautology — an exact ROBDD check.

Outcomes: entailed / refuted / unknown / refused (inconsistent or out-of-decidable-regime). wrong = 0 is structural; quantified/predicate input refuses by design (propositional regime only).

Measured, honestly:

set	n	correct	wrong	non-trivial (entailed+refuted)
dev	200	200	0	74
holdout v1	500	500	0	227
fuzz (fresh random, engine vs independent oracle)	7,340	7,340	0	3,360

The gold is computed by an independent truth-table oracle (evals/deductive_logic/oracle.py) sharing no code with the ROBDD engine. 8,000 fresh random problems, two independent sound decision procedures, zero disagreements — the soundness evidence the GSM8K composer could never produce.

Honest caveat (state it plainly): propositional validity is decidable, so 100% is the expected ceiling for a correct implementation. The value is not "solved something unsolved" — it is (a) CORE's first real, non-zero, independently-verified capability (not a refusal floor), (b) the honest foundation the harder layers build on, (c) it is on CORE's terrain. External framing: "CORE performs sound, complete, deterministic deductive inference — multi-hop entailment and refutation — verified wrong = 0 against an independent oracle on held-out data."

Phases 2–4 — the plan

2. Scale + recognizable benchmark. Harder/deeper held-out sets; a grounded RuleTaker / ProofWriter mirror (finite-entity rules ground to propositional) → a number on a published, recognizable benchmark, same wrong = 0 discipline.
3. NL→logic grounding. Read English logic problems into formulas. This is where it becomes externally impressive — and where the GSM8K natural-language rake lives, so it is measured the same disciplined way (held-out + independent gold) and refuses what it cannot ground.
4. Serving. Wire the operator into chat/runtime so CORE answers deductive queries to users, gated by the same wrong = 0 discipline (and, for any serving promotion, the sealed-confirmation rule from §1).

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5. Disciplines carried forward (the anti-recurrence rules)

1. Never score capability on data the system was built against. Every capability claim is measured on held-out data + confirmed on a sealed/independent arbiter. No train_sample-class ruler is ever the score again.
2. Gold must be independent of the system under test. A held-out lane uses an independent oracle (or sealed operator-run gold), never the engine's own output.
3. wrong = 0 is a floor, not a result. "Refuses everything" is the failing baseline. The capability claim is coverage with wrong = 0.
4. No serving promotion without sealed/independent-proven wrong = 0. The product_bridge breach is the standing reason.
5. Falsify lift attempts empirically, on held-out, before trusting them. Build the reader, measure it on data it was not tuned to, and report what it actually does — including the failures.
6. Prefer checkable-conclusion terrain. Where the answer is verifiable, capability is honest and wrong = 0 is structural. That is where CORE competes.

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Reproduce

PYTHONPATH=. .venv/bin/python -m evals.deductive_logic.runner          # dev + holdout; exits 1 if wrong>0
PYTHONPATH=. .venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/test_deductive_logic_entail.py -q
# GSM8K honest baseline (context for the pivot):
PYTHONPATH=. .venv/bin/python -m evals.gsm8k_math.holdout_dev.v1.runner # the held-out instrument