Laboratories
Environments built to observe before they conclude
XGCS tests whether different ways of reading market structure remain useful beyond their first fit. Each laboratory defines the subject, instrument boundary, provenance, and evidence standard before it makes a claim.
LAB 01 / Public
Heatmap Strategy Lab
A public-safe record of multi-program candidate search, archive geometry, failure memory, and recorded research activity. Source, timestamp, coverage, and exclusions remain visible inside every instrument.
- Subject
- Candidate search, research throughput, archive diversity, prospective observation, and controlled failure memory.
- Public mode
- Verified website-safe snapshot with a bounded recorded replay. No continuous live connection is claimed.
- Private boundary
- Internal formulas, strategy logic, and sensitive research data remain private.
- Claim boundary
- The instrument does not promise investment performance or remove uncertainty.
The finding / What the search has settled
Direction is null. Risk is not.
Across every price and OHLCV-derived ordering the laboratory has tried, the field carries information about risk and magnitude, and direction comes back null. That is the clearest result the work has produced, and it took the larger part of the search to reach.
The precise form matters. No net-of-cost, market-beating standalone edge has survived. That is not the same as saying there is nothing there: several directional signals are statistically real and then die on transaction costs, which makes them harvest-walled rather than absent. Nor is it a claim that the space is exhausted or closed. It is a statement about what has been tested, on the data the laboratory currently produces.
It is published here because a laboratory that only reports the questions still open is not reporting. The exhibits below are the record this conclusion was drawn from, including the register of what failed and the retraction of the one performance figure this site published.
Public artifact / Field census
First see the machine as a whole.
The census shows which approved research programs were active, the scale of recorded evaluation, and a bounded sample of sanitized process events. It describes research activity, not trading performance.
XGCS / HSL FIELD CENSUS
- INSTRUMENT
- RECORDED RESEARCH ACTIVITY
- ARTIFACT
- hsl_20260826T221952Z_30f6d81ac86e
- SOURCE
- Verified website-safe HSL snapshot
- AS OF
- Aug 26, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC
Who / What / Why
A research machine that keeps both survivors and failure.
Heatmap Strategy Lab searches across multiple research programs. Candidate structures are generated, challenged, archived, rejected, revived, or moved into forward observation. The public view preserves the shape of that work while excluding formulas, candidate identities, returns, forecasts, and positions.
- Programs
- 8 4 running, 3 paused, 1 stopped
- Evaluations
- 942,601 research throughput, not performance
- Archive cells
- 374 current occupants across three programs
- Rejection records
- 8,855 typed records, each batching many rejected candidates
Read these totals with the contamination in mind. A look-ahead was found in three programs' exit rule on 2026-08-27. Those programs account for 224 of 374 archive occupants (60%), 120,795 of 942,601 evaluations (13%) and 2,765 of 8,855 rejection records (31%). Their work is counted here because it happened, not because it stands: the decisions that retained those candidates were made on scores now known to be wrong. The programs are stopped and are being rebuilt from scratch on corrected code.
When / How
Recorded activity across a bounded event sample.
WHERE / Heatmap Strategy Lab, recorded in snapshot hsl_20260826T221952Z_30f6d81ac86e.
FRESHNESS / ARCHIVAL SNAPSHOT. Exported at Aug 26, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC. This page does not claim a continuous live connection.
EXCLUDED FROM THIS INSTRUMENT / Positions, orders, forecasts, returns, formulas, genomes, model weights, raw event text, and private topology. The forward track further down this page used to publish a return; it was withdrawn on 2026-08-27 after a look-ahead was found in the program behind it, and no return figure is published anywhere on this site today.
Public artifact / Model evidence
Now test whether an attractive result survives.
This approved aggregate follows one formulation from a positive selection-period result into a negative independent validation result. Click each mark and control to inspect why the candidate stopped before the locked forward holdout.
A promising fit is allowed to fail.
This recorded case answers a narrow question: does the laboratory stop an initially attractive candidate when independent validation and controls disagree?
| Stage | Rank correlation | Overlap-safe t | Dates | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +0.0249 | 1.123 | 38 | Not distinguishable from zero | |
| -0.0051 | -0.202 | 26 | Not distinguishable from zero | |
| NOT CONSUMED | — | — | Never opened |
Neither measured stage clears its own significance test. This is not a relationship that existed and then reversed; it is a number that was never separable from noise, and a second period that confirmed it. The locked holdout was never opened.
Public artifact / Archive reconstruction
The laboratory shows its search shape.
This artifact uses the verified website-safe HSL snapshot. It can show current archive occupants and recorded update generations; it cannot support conclusions about quality, performance, or the archive's prior history.
XGCS / LIVING FIELD LAB
- INSTRUMENT
- QUALITY-DIVERSITY ARCHIVE
- ARTIFACT
- HSL-QD-ARCHIVE-01
- SOURCE
- HSL website-safe snapshot / Broad cross-asset search
- AS OF
- Aug 26, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC
Recorded field / Five dimensions / One public boundary
A search field shaped by what survives.
Six primary families hold the other four axes still: reach runs vertically by regime; direction runs horizontally by cost. The compass stays fixed while the evidence field changes around it.
What to take from this: the search has reached 150 of 648 possible behaviours, about 23% of the space. The lit cells are where it has found something worth keeping. The empty ones are mostly where it has not looked yet, not where it tried and failed.
field
73 / 108correlation
4 / 108cross-sectional
18 / 108rolling
32 / 108time-series
12 / 108other
11 / 108One-pass reconstruction · pauses offscreen and in background tabs
Inference boundary. Update generation is not discovery time, persistence, quality, return, or confidence. The reconstruction describes current occupants in one recorded snapshot only.
Public artifact / Failure memory
The laboratory keeps what did not survive.
The archive alone would show only survivors. Failure Memory restores the other half of the research process by retaining aggregate rejection records without exposing candidate identities, formulas, or individual outcomes.
XGCS / NULL REGISTRY
- INSTRUMENT
- FAILURE MEMORY
- ARTIFACT
- HSL-NULL-REGISTRY-01
- SOURCE
- HSL website-safe snapshot / Eight approved research programs
- AS OF
- Aug 26, 2026, UTC
Null is a result / absence is not zero
What did not survive remains part of the instrument.
Most public research surfaces display only the surviving line. This register gives typed failures a durable place without publishing candidate identities, formulas, individual outcomes, or raw event text.
92.4% of 8,855 recorded rejections stopped at a single check: did not clear the evidence threshold.
8,855 of 8,855 aggregate rejections visible.
Deliberately excluded: candidate names and identifiers, genomes, formulas, fitness, forward P&L, verdicts, individual OOS results, and event text.
RECORDED OVER 10 DAYS / Aug 17 TO Aug 26
How many candidates actually make it through?
Every other view of this record is a running total. This is the only one that moves: candidates entering, waiting, surviving, and being rejected, sampled continuously across 4,950 readings.
- Waiting on more evidence
- Enrolled for observation
- Still surviving
- Rejected by this program
- Waiting on more evidence
- 553 → 72
- Enrolled for observation
- 560 → 953
- Still surviving
- 49 → 905
- Rejected by this program
- 0 → 0unchanged
- Waiting on more evidence
- 92 → 106
- Enrolled for observation
- 102 → 114
- Still surviving
- 7 → 7unchanged
- Rejected by this program
- 194 → 194unchanged
- Waiting on more evidence
- 0 → 0unchanged
- Enrolled for observation
- 9 → 12
- Still surviving
- 7 → 10
- Rejected by this program
- 2 → 2unchanged
- Waiting on more evidence
- 2 → 2unchanged
- Enrolled for observation
- 1 → 1unchanged
- Still surviving
- 0 → 0unchanged
- Rejected by this program
- 0 → 0unchanged
Withdrawn 2026-08-27
This exhibit published a return. It should not have.
Until 2026-08-27 this page showed a forward track: 136 candidates from the
field-direction-surf program, frozen on 2026-07-21, watched for 25 sessions
without intervention, most of them positive. It was the only forward performance figure on this
site. That program is named in the weekly research notes on this site, so this retraction
can be checked against our own published record rather than taken on trust.
It was wrong, and the defect was in our own code. The exit rule for that program read its inputs at the close of a bar and was then scored against that same bar's return, so it closed losing positions using information that did not exist at the moment the decision would have been made. Shift the exit by the one bar it should always have been shifted by and the result does not shrink, it disappears.
| Candidate | Sharpe, gross | Sharpe, after costs | Information coefficient |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best enrolled | 13.1 → 0.200 | 11.5 → -1.8 | 0.109 → 0.004 |
| Median enrolled | 16.0 → 0.500 | 14.1 → -1.4 | 0.106 → 0.003 |
| Worst enrolled | 4.0 → -0.300 | 2.9 → -1.3 | 0.039 → -0.001 |
| Already culled | 15.3 → 0.300 | 13.6 → -1.4 | 0.105 → 0.001 |
Every one of them goes to approximately zero gross and to a loss after costs. The information coefficient, which is the part that would have to be real for any of this to mean anything, goes to within rounding distance of nothing. This was checked against the corrected code as deployed rather than an offline patch, and the original figures can no longer be reproduced.
The forward track carried the same defect, because it re-runs the same exit. It was never a clean out-of-sample number, and no amount of forward observation would have revealed that, because the leak travels with the rule rather than with the data.
We found it ourselves, by attacking our own result rather than defending it. Nobody reported it, no counterparty lost money on it, and it was caught before it was ever acted on. That is the machinery on the rest of this page doing the job it exists to do: a result is held against the tests that would kill it, and this one died.
It is the reason the exhibit is gone rather than footnoted. A qualified performance number would ask you to trust a judgement about how much of it survived. There is no such judgement available here, and the honest version of this page is one with a hole in it. A research record is only worth reading if the people keeping it will also publish the entries that cost them something.
Nothing replaces it today. The programs unaffected by this defect are honest and earn roughly nothing after costs, and putting those here instead would be choosing a number because it was available rather than because it meant something. The affected programs are stopped and are being rebuilt from scratch on corrected code. If a replacement figure ever appears in this space, it will have been through the same tests that removed this one.
Every exhibit above is a still. The training gym puts the same record on a time axis and lets you scrub it.