Verdicts & the gradient
An AlphaAssay verdict is a diagnosis, not a yes/no oracle. Four outcomes exist:
pass, conditional, fail and insufficient_evidence —
and every one of them ships with the evidence that produced it.
What does a verdict contain, field by field?
Every gauntlet verdict carries the same parts: a schema tag, the verdict
itself, the stage it died_at, machine-readable failure_codes, the graded
stages with their evidence, the family budget, and the identifiers
spec_hash / family_id — each defined in the table below.
| field | meaning |
|---|---|
| verdict | pass · conditional · fail · insufficient_evidence. „Insufficient evidence" is an honest abstention — too little data to judge is an answer, not a failure of ours. |
| died_at | the first stage your signal failed — any of the eleven graded stages below, e.g. net_edge, funding_edge, placebo or capacity (see the gates). null on a pass. |
| failure_codes | machine-readable causes your agent branches on, e.g. no_net_edge or deflated_out_at_n=N. Catalog: failure codes. |
| stages | the graded stages, in order — net_edge, funding_edge, family_deflation, power_honesty, significance, cpcv, walk_forward, concentration, placebo, capacity, graveyard_prior — each with a verdict (pass / fail / skipped / info) and its own evidence. funding_edge charges the perpetual funding leg against every holding period — carry income is not timing skill; power_honesty and significance are honesty stamps (info), cpcv tests the record across purged combinatorial time-partitions, walk_forward checks whether the in-sample fit carries into anchored out-of-sample folds, concentration asks whether the book survives without its single best bars, and the placebo stage's evidence.percentile is your timing against 500 random twins; 50 means „indistinguishable from chance". |
| budget | cumulative_n, n_trials_effective and break_even_n: the family's cumulative search budget — with near-duplicate variants collapsed to their effective count (effective_n_method) — plus the trial count at which this very result would deflate out. Ends the endless tweaking loop with a number. |
| spec_hash · family_id | content-derived identifiers of the signal and its family. For an evaluated pre-registration, a separate REST certificate-issuance action adds an Ed25519-signed artifact; the free demo verdict is unsigned. |
When a signal passes the gauntlet, the forensics report adds an
adversarial survival_map — eight attacks (execution lag, cost stress, time jackknife, regime
split, parameter neighbourhood, cpcv partition, synthetic null, drift burst), each marked survives or dead. It is part of the forensics
path, not the free demo verdict.
Why is a fail worth paying for?
A no without a finding is an annoyance. A no with died_at and failure codes is a shortcut:
it tells you whether to fix the costs, stop tweaking the family, or abandon the direction entirely —
before real money finds out for you.
When is a result reproducible or replayed?
Pure/read operations are reproducible only with the same explicit as_of. Stateful calls
expose their effective timestamp and may reflect cumulative tenant state. An exact stored stateful
replay is promised only when the same non-empty request_id and the same canonical request
return the stored response. For the unsigned golden demo, assert the documented semantic answer fields
rather than the whole envelope.