Giorgio Gilestro
6f8cef1ac5
Removed from main (all preserved on the dev branch): the arXiv build and
its sources, design documents (blueprint, results summary, review responses,
essay drafts), tasks/ and CLAUDE.md, the cover letter and reference tooling,
two unused manuscript figures, and every experiment that feeds no figure or
number in the paper: the collapse null, the sexual-vs-asexual lineage, the
NK speciation variant, the 0.5B single-seed LLM prototypes, the compose and
society experiments with their calibration and pilot runs, and their
configs, runners, tests, figure scripts and PBS jobs. Their result bundles
are moved to results/_archive/ (ignored) so the parquets stay on disk.
Also: plot_llm_speciation reads the s{seed}/ layout; the mating-breadth
plot writes under its bundle name; Makefile targets reduced to the kept
experiments; REPRODUCING.md and README point to dev for the rest.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Y64o8FKP7rCuXzC48pxpMm
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| figS9_specialist_superparent.png | ||
| manifest.json | ||
| README.md | ||
| resolved_config.yaml | ||
E8 — the vertical claim: n-parent recombination exceeds any parent (Fisher–Muller)
Claim tested. The society's headline, and the thing no fixed-p* model could express: can an
offspring recombined from many decorrelated parents be fitter than any parent — capability that
exceeds every component, not merely recovers a ceiling?
Setup. A capability is a genotype of L=12 biallelic loci; fitness = number of correct
loci; the optimum (all-correct, fitness 12) is a genotype no parent possesses. Each parent is a
specialist: confident-correct (hi=0.9) on the loci it has mastered, agnostic (lo=0.45) on the
rest. Which loci each masters comes from the exact shared-switch construction, so parent count
K_T and decorrelation ρ are clean, independently-swept knobs. Deployed capability = fitness
of the mode (most-probable) genotype — what you would ship. 40 replicates.
Symbols
- parent = a specialist model; offspring = the recombined model;
K_T= number of parents (unbounded — biological sex is stuck at 2; model merging is not). ρ= correlation of which loci parents master (0 = complementary, 1 = identical clones).- best parent = fittest single specialist · average = mean-mixture "model soup" (combine, don't recombine) · sexual = union-preserving recombination (assemble the best allele of each locus).
The two panels
- Recombination exceeds any parent (ρ=0). Deployed capability vs
K_T: sexual (red) climbs to the optimum (12) as parents accumulate — a genotype none of them had — while the best single parent (grey) plateaus at ~8.7 and the model soup (blue) reaches ~11.6 but is beaten by sexual at everyK_T(and badly at smallK_T: at 2 parents, sexual 9.0 vs soup 7.2 vs best 6.9). - Decorrelation is the fuel. Sexual capability vs
K_Tforρ ∈ {0, 0.5, 1}: decorrelated parents (ρ=0) climb to the optimum; identical clones (ρ=1) buy nothing (flat at ~6). The benefit is combinatorial reach across complementary parents, not merely "more models".
Takeaway
This is the Fisher–Muller effect for AI: recombination assembles beneficial variants that live in different parents into an offspring fitter than any of them. It is the rigorous, un-preempted core of the Lamarckian society — collapse is asexual degradation; the cure is sex, with no parent limit. It reframes model merging from "averaging weights" to "meiotic reassortment", and it is the mechanism by which general capability can climb while each specialty is re-earned and exceeded. The dynamic version (why a lone lineage cannot do this) is E7. Falsifier (not triggered): if sexual never exceeded the best parent, or averaging matched it, the vertical claim would fail.