Sundog Pressure Mines
A mapped failure region, paired with a narrow confirmed pocket. The result is progress before failure, not minefield clearance.
Reading the Minefield
The mine is hidden. The field still bends around it.
Sundog Pressure Mines asks whether an agent can make safer progress when mine locations are hidden and nearby tiles offer only a noisy, lossy pressure field instead of exact adjacency counts.
This is not about building a better puzzle solver. It is about showing a legible environment where hidden danger leaves enough indirect structure for bounded action—inside a mapped observability envelope.
Phase 10 confirms a narrow operating pocket where confidence-gated pressure control reveals more safe tiles than naive pressure ordering before both controllers eventually trigger mines. This does not claim field clearance.
Mapped failure
Density 0.22, pressure noise 1.0, dropout 0.35:
sundog_lean lost -4.71875 budget-adjusted safe
tiles versus naive_pressure, CI [-8.375781,
-1.496484].
Confirmed pocket
Density 0.16, pressure noise 2.0, dropout 0.2:
sundog_minimal beat naive_pressure by +7.21875
budget-adjusted safe tiles, 95% CI [3.375, 11.078516].
sundog_lean also cleared the gate at +6.3125,
CI [1.921094, 11.25].
In the best cell, both controllers still trigger mines on
every seed; Sundog's result is more safe progress before
failure. threshold_flagger survives 62.5% of that cell
but pays in false flags, so it stays visible as a comparator
rather than the promoted claim.
The confirmed cell is still watch_boundary, right at the
field-uninformative caution edge. The claim is provisional
and narrow, not a blanket pressure-field readability claim.
Why This Workbench
Balance asks whether the body can be controlled through its cast shadow. Three-body asks whether useful action can be taken from compressed signatures around instability. Pressure Mines asks the same family question in a game that nearly everyone already understands:
- The danger is hidden
- Nearby tiles carry traces
- Those traces are partial, noisy, and sometimes misleading
- The player must still act
This makes Pressure Mines a strong first game-native Sundog surface because the core theoremic move is legible without any physics background. The viewer does not need to accept orbital mechanics, optics, or robotics conventions. The board itself says what the experiment is about.