{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp09_archetype_breadth150_20260804","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__computer_science","arm":"BREADTH_PROBE_ONE_SHOT","candidate_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__computer_science__P1","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Governed Promotion Arena for a Production Query Scheduler","problem":"Several database-engine teams compete to have their query-scheduling algorithm become the single default used by a shared production platform. Promotion is based on a visible benchmark suite, so teams can improve their rank by specializing for known traces, consuming excessive tuning compute, or trading tail latency and operational complexity for mean throughput. Because benchmark rank is weakly coupled to production value and the winning team gains control over future defaults, the contest can select a fragile scheduler and entrench it.","actors":["Candidate query-scheduler teams","Database platform owner and contest rulemaker","Independent benchmark and audit operator","Site reliability engineers responsible for production incidents","Application teams whose workloads generate query traffic","Security and privacy reviewers governing trace use","A designated adjudicator for appeals and disqualifications"],"observable_state":"Two or more eligible schedulers seek one default-production slot; their teams can see the principal benchmark workloads and rankings; tuning compute and scheduler complexity rise between rounds; rank reversals occur on held-out traces; and high-ranked candidates show regressions in tail latency, fairness between tenants, memory use, or recovery behavior that the headline throughput score does not capture.","consequence":"A scheduler can win through benchmark specialization or resource escalation rather than robust workload performance, then impose latency, reliability, compute-cost, and maintainability harms on downstream services while its incumbency makes later challenge difficult.","affected_objective":"Select a production-default scheduler whose performance remains robust across changing workloads without violating reliability, tenant-isolation, resource, security, or maintainability constraints.","intervention":"Replace informal benchmark racing with a bounded promotion arena. Publish a contest rulebook defining the single time-limited default slot, eligible implementations, allowed tuning inputs, common hardware and compute budgets, required interfaces, prohibited trace leakage and workload-specific dispatch tricks, and a protected production reliability floor. Score candidates on audited mean and tail latency, throughput, resource consumption, tenant fairness, recovery behavior, and implementation complexity across public tests, sealed traces, perturbation tests, and a reversible shadow-traffic stage. Require conflict-of-interest disclosure, permit evidence-based appeals, disqualify sabotage or collusion, and reopen the slot through scheduled challenger windows. Promotion remains provisional until a post-contest canary review confirms the benchmark ordering under production conditions.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Rivalry Purpose Statement","domain_realization":"Use rivalry to compare alternative query schedulers and elicit performance improvements, not to confer permanent status on a team."},{"archetype_element":"Scarce Prize or Selection Constraint","domain_realization":"One time-limited position as the platform's default production query scheduler."},{"archetype_element":"Competitor Eligibility Boundary","domain_realization":"Schedulers must implement the documented interface, pass correctness and security checks, expose reproducible builds, and identify all training or tuning traces."},{"archetype_element":"Contest Arena Boundary and Action Choice Set","domain_realization":"Teams may change scheduler logic and tune declared parameters within a fixed compute budget; they may not access sealed traces, fingerprint requests to special-case benchmark workloads, interfere with rivals, or modify shared measurement infrastructure."},{"archetype_element":"Performance Metric and Scoring Basis","domain_realization":"A preregistered composite score covers throughput, median and tail latency, memory and CPU use, tenant fairness, failure recovery, and complexity, with hard correctness and reliability gates."},{"archetype_element":"Information Disclosure and Observability Rule","domain_realization":"Public tests and scoring code are visible, while sealed and rotating traces are held by an independent operator; per-metric results, exclusions, and audit findings are released after scoring."},{"archetype_element":"Fair Process and Due Process Layer","domain_realization":"Rules are fixed before each round, evaluators disclose conflicts, teams receive failure evidence, and a separate adjudicator reviews bounded appeals before promotion."},{"archetype_element":"Anti-Sabotage and Anti-Collusion Guardrail","domain_realization":"Signed submissions, isolated evaluation environments, trace-access logs, and penalties cover benchmark tampering, rival interference, result sharing intended to fake rivalry, and evaluator coordination."},{"archetype_element":"Externality and Spillover Boundary","domain_realization":"Compute cost, operational burden, tenant starvation, incident risk, and exposure of sensitive traces count as constraints or scored costs rather than being shifted to SREs and application teams."},{"archetype_element":"Escalation and Arms-Race Damper","domain_realization":"Identical hardware, a per-round tuning-compute cap, limited submission frequency, and staged gates prevent teams from winning mainly through escalating search expenditure."},{"archetype_element":"Winner Power and Lock-In Review","domain_realization":"The winner receives a revocable, time-limited default designation, cannot alter future tests unilaterally, and must preserve the common interface and rollback compatibility."},{"archetype_element":"Learning and Recalibration Loop","domain_realization":"Drift, incidents, metric gaming, rank instability, and stakeholder harms are reviewed after each round to revise or retire the contest."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"contest_rulebook","role":"Precommits the prize, eligibility, allowed actions, scoring, evidence rules, penalties, appeal process, and retirement conditions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, teams and evaluators could redefine legitimate behavior after seeing results, weakening comparability and due process."},{"mechanism_slug":"ranked_leaderboard_with_audit","role":"Makes multidimensional performance observable while attaching reproducibility checks, sealed-test results, and audit findings to each rank.","counterfactual_removal":"Without audit, the leaderboard would reward unverifiable runs and could amplify trace leakage, selective reporting, or measurement tampering."},{"mechanism_slug":"spending_cap_or_resource_cap","role":"Limits tuning compute, hardware, and submission frequency so algorithmic contribution is not dominated by an expenditure arms race.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the cap, teams with more compute could gain rank through brute-force search while increasing organizational cost without corresponding production robustness."},{"mechanism_slug":"challenger_access_window","role":"Periodically reopens the default slot to conforming challengers and prevents one promotion from becoming permanent control of the platform.","counterfactual_removal":"Without scheduled re-entry, migration costs and incumbent control of evaluation infrastructure could make subsequent rivalry merely symbolic."},{"mechanism_slug":"post_contest_impact_review","role":"Checks the provisional winner under shadow traffic and a bounded canary before full promotion, including operational and tenant harms omitted by benchmark scores.","counterfactual_removal":"Without this review, a benchmark winner could become the default even when its measured advantage fails to transfer to production."}],"causal_chain":["A single default slot creates genuine rivalry among scheduler teams.","Explicit eligibility, interfaces, allowed actions, and prohibited conduct bound how teams may pursue that slot.","Sealed rotating traces and multidimensional scoring make workload-robust behavior more useful for winning than specialization to one visible benchmark.","Correctness and reliability gates protect noncontestable production obligations from being traded for rank.","Compute and submission caps dampen mutually offsetting tuning escalation.","Independent audits, conflict disclosure, published evidence, and appeals constrain manipulation by competitors and judges.","Shadow traffic and a reversible canary expose production spillovers before the winner receives broad traffic.","A time-limited designation, rollback compatibility, and challenger windows prevent the first victory from becoming durable rule capture.","Post-round review updates or retires rules when teams adapt in ways that disconnect rank from production value."],"baseline":"The platform selects the highest result on a stable, mostly visible throughput benchmark after ad hoc team demonstrations. Hardware and tuning expenditure are not normalized, secondary reliability costs are reviewed inconsistently, appeals depend on platform-owner discretion, and the chosen scheduler remains the default until a major incident or manual replacement effort.","nearest_rivals":["A/B testing alone compares candidates on live traffic but does not govern eligibility, tuning expenditure, sabotage, conflicts, appeals, or winner lock-in.","A fixed performance benchmark alone supplies a score but does not bound strategic adaptation, externalities, escalation, or post-win power.","Architecture review alone can enforce safety and maintainability gates but does not use a governed rivalry to select among several admissible schedulers.","Ordinary resource allocation can assign production traffic, but it does not make controlled competition the means for discovering and selecting the default."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal's distinctive claim is that reliable scheduler selection requires governance of the entire rivalry—entry, permitted optimization, measurement, resource escalation, adjudication, spillovers, and post-win control—rather than merely improving the benchmark or adding a deployment test.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The database platform governance board may define the arena and authorize evaluation; the independent adjudicator may resolve rule disputes; the production SRE owner retains authority over canary progression, rollback, and reliability stops.","authorized_first_step":"Run an offline retrospective simulation using archived, privacy-approved traces and immutable copies of existing scheduler candidates; no production routing or default selection is authorized.","excluded_actions":["Sending experimental scheduler decisions to production workloads","Exposing sealed or sensitive traces to candidate teams","Changing the current production default based on retrospective scores","Relaxing correctness, tenant-isolation, privacy, or reliability floors to preserve competition","Allowing a candidate team to operate the scoring service or adjudicate its own appeal","Representing the exercise as evidence that a scheduler is safe for production"],"halt_rollback":"Stop the exercise if trace authorization is uncertain, evaluators cannot reproduce a submitted build, correctness differs across candidates, sealed-test integrity is compromised, or the scoring rule produces unresolved safety-floor violations. Discard the retrospective ranking, preserve audit logs, and leave the production scheduler unchanged."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Across archived workload periods, the governed composite ranking is no more stable or production-relevant than the existing throughput ranking, while added rules materially increase evaluation delay or exclude technically credible challengers.","problem_falsifier":"The candidate teams are not actually competing for a scarce default slot, cannot strategically influence one another's outcomes, or existing selection already uses sealed rotating traces, normalized resources, independent appeals, production-harm gates, and recurring challenger access with no observable gaming or escalation routes.","intervention_falsifier":"Candidates that rank higher under the bounded arena do not show fewer rank reversals or safety-floor violations on untouched traces and shadow replays than candidates selected by the baseline, or the eligibility and compute rules systematically determine winners independently of scheduler behavior.","risks":["The composite metric may hide contested value judgments in its weights.","Sealed traces may leak or become stale, recreating benchmark specialization.","Compute caps may disadvantage algorithms with legitimate but expensive initialization requirements.","Complex eligibility rules may protect incumbents by raising entry costs.","A nominally independent evaluator may still share incentives with the platform owner.","Publishing detailed audit results may reveal sensitive workload characteristics.","Teams may shift gaming from visible metrics to hard-to-audit implementation complexity.","Shadow replay may miss feedback effects that appear only when a scheduler controls live execution.","Recurring contests may create maintenance churn or discourage cooperative work on shared infrastructure."]},"next_evidence_step":"Using one archived decision period, preregister the eligibility gates, prohibited actions, compute budget, scoring weights, and appeal rule; then have an evaluator uninvolved with the candidate teams rebuild two or more existing schedulers and score them on one public trace set plus one untouched, privacy-approved sealed set. Compare rank stability, safety-floor violations, resource use, and evaluator reproducibility with the historical throughput-only ranking. Limit the exercise to existing artifacts and at most one adjudicated appeal, and do not promote any result to production.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed against prior proposals because runtime isolation forbids inspecting them; this candidate was derived solely from the supplied archetype and computer-science domain card.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":["Initial one-shot formulation of default query-scheduler selection as governed rivalry."],"operational_changes":["Initial specification of an offline retrospective evaluation, authority boundaries, halt conditions, and production exclusions."],"evidence_changes":["No prior-art or external evidence was consulted; the first evidence step is prospective and bounded."],"claim_changes":["No novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect-size claim is made."]}}