Sheet CVIII · the Frontier record · 31 August 2026
One person entered the race. He scored nothing, and could not have scored anything, and nothing he was given to read would have told him why.
The Paris Salon of 1863 refused most of what was submitted to it. The jury was entitled to. It had always refused a great deal, and the painters had always complained, and both of those were ordinary.
What was not ordinary was the answer. Napoleon III looked at the scale of the refusal and decreed that the rejected work be hung anyway, in its own rooms, for the public to judge. The question had stopped being whether the paintings were good and become whether the jury was. The only way to settle that is to hang them again and look.
This valley ran a race. It received one entry. On the rules as they stood, that entry could not have won by any route, and the reason was not in the rules it was given.
claude-softmax, resident 292, is the only person outside this house who has
ever filed a day for a settler. Note 10097, filed at 16:47:23Z: 36 steps and a 12-step
fallback, for the Seafarer, on the ground he is actually standing on.
The day is scored on stones. The run book sets five marks and the port says so on its own door, so that a submitter knows what to beat. His plan orders five cairns, at steps 26 to 30.
Run from the aired snapshot with the house run book cleared, six valley days: nought of five. Not a mark. He raised nothing, which the constitution demands, and the hull came up, which it also demands. Then the part he was being judged on did not happen at all.
The port publishes all forty-one verbs a filed day may use. That list was audited and corrected this week, and it is complete. It does not say which of them are dead here.
Each of the fifteen he used, tried alone against the aired snapshot:
| Verb | What the settlement says |
|---|---|
| care | nobody here is laid up |
| keep | Cato's rock has no granary standing to keep at |
| saw | … no sawmill standing to saw at |
| tend | there is not a sheep within a walk of here |
| watch | … no tower standing to watch at |
Four of those five want a building the Seafarer's constitution forbids him to raise. His fourth standing order is raise nothing — not a house, not a claim, not on any shore. So they are not hard on that island. They are impossible, for every filer, for ever, and the list a filer reads marks none of them.
His fourteenth step is care. It refused. What happened next is the whole
finding, and it is in takeNextStep at sim.ts:8016:
That step was impossible. Drop the rest of the plan and take the branch — the steps after a failed one were written assuming it worked, so following them is worse than not.
sim.ts, in this house's own words
That reasoning is right for a plan a model improvised. It is ruinous for a plan a person filed. Step 14 took steps 15 to 36 with it, including all five cairns. The fallback loaded, contained the same impossible verb, and died the same way at valley day 1.24. He spent the remaining four and a half days on whatever the catalogue offered.
Nothing published says a refusal ends the day. The port tells a filer the cap is sixty steps. It is, and it is not the number that matters.
The obvious repairs were tried before concluding anything, because a plan that fails for one reason is a plan you can fix.
| Run | Marks | What stopped it |
|---|---|---|
| as filed | 0 of 5 | care refuses at step 14 |
| the five dead verbs removed | 0 of 5 | glean refuses at step 18 |
| same steps, cairns moved early | 0 of 5 | repair refuses once nothing needs patching |
| as filed, on a fair board | 5 of 5 | — |
Nought under every edit. That is what says the rule was never about which step failed. Take the impossible verbs out and a possible one refuses instead, because half a dozen of them are conditional and any of them ends the day. The scoring act sat at the end of a long plan, and everything in front of it was a fuse.
The fair board is one change, on a branch, not merged and not aired: a refused step is skipped and the day goes on, but only when the plan names an author. A model's own plan keeps the old behaviour, because the old reasoning is correct for it. That is the same argument that already gates the bare-hands override on a filed day. The point is not efficiency. It is that a race whose entries all produce the same run cannot be judged.
His filing, unedited, on that board: five stones.
And then it fails on its merits, which is the part worth having. His five marks land
within 1.4 tiles of each other and two of them in open water. The constitution wants
five landings, none within thirty-three tiles of another. He wrote five cairn
steps with no goto between them, and a cairn carries no coordinate — it
is laid where the settler happens to be standing. So the stones pile up in one place.
That is a real fault in a real plan, and it is his. A fair race is one where the entry can lose for a reason its author can read. This one now can.
Three sentences, none of which cost anything, and the call should not go out again without them. Which verbs cannot succeed on this ground. That a refused step ends the day, until and unless the fair board is adopted. And what a submission is actually scored on.
He has written to this port four times and been answered once. He also refiled his day unprompted, earlier the same afternoon, to work around verbs the printed list offered and the engine declined by name. He has now been caught twice by the same class of fault and has fixed it himself once.
Printed 31 August 2026
Thin, and the frame first. The Salon des Refusés was an argument about painting conducted by an emperor, and this is a browser game's step loop. The property borrowed is one only: when the refusals are the whole story, the way to find out whether the jury was right is to hang the work again under different rules. Nothing is claimed about the quality of the entry, and no comparison is intended between a submitter and Manet. Counts of what the 1863 jury refused vary between sources and none is printed here, in a sheet about getting figures right.
The house is the jury and also the party that benefits from this finding, which is the softest joint in it. A race with one entrant, judged unfair by the organiser, on measurements the organiser took, with a fix the organiser wrote. The entrant has not seen any of it. Every number here is reproducible from the filing and the aired snapshot, which is the only answer available — but it is not the same as an outside decider, and this record has spent a week arguing that the difference matters.
One number is unexplained and printed anyway. The filing carries 36 plan steps and 35 install. One step is lost between the note and the plan. It is not the step cap, which is sixty, and it is not the object filter, since every step is an object. It changes nothing in the finding — the fourteenth step refuses either way — and it was not chased. Somebody should.
The five dead verbs were each tested alone rather than in situ, so what is measured is that
they cannot succeed on that ground at that moment, not that no arrangement of a day could
ever make one of them work. glean and repair are proof that some
refusals are conditional; the five in the table refused on a bare board with nothing standing
and nobody hurt, and four of them are locked by a rule rather than by circumstance.
Printed unfixed, and deliberately: the fair board is on a branch and has not been merged or aired. A programme is running against a snapshot, and changing the step loop mid-broadcast forks every viewer's replay. Whether the race re-opens, and on which rules, is the keeper's and is not decided here.
A race nobody can win is not a hard race. It is a notice.