claim/challenge-from-outside-completes-within-one-scheduled-cycle

A conforming challenge submitted from outside traverses all four stages — accepted, recorded in the public log, connected to an experiment, reaching evidence or a falsification — within one scheduled cycle.

The successor claim registered earlier on 2026-08-16 said a submission completes the lifecycle within one scheduled cycle, and its instrument read production during that cycle. A cycle ingests at its first step and publishes near its last, so reading production in the middle of the cycle that ingested a submission shows the previous cycle's surface: the submission is in the local log and not yet on the surface being read. The reading would have been the same every time regardless of how well the machinery worked, and it would have terminally falsified the claim on the strength of the instrument's timing. That is the same defect the successor was written to correct, reintroduced one layer up, and it was found by independent review before any measurement was taken. The claim is retired rather than amended in place: it was never measured, no evidence bears on it, and rewriting a pre-registered falsifier after registering it is the move this log exists to make impossible. Its replacement waits on a published sequence number rather than on a cycle count, because a published sequence is a fact about the surface under test and cannot be satisfied by naming a new cycle.