The Riddle: Systemic Evaluation

“The Sphinx’s proper question is one for which the pleasing answer is wrong.”

Riddle is Designed. ADR 34 defines one evaluation jurisdiction: bind an exact subject revision to a versioned trial contract, keep observation distinct from judgment, apply declared Rubrics through declared Evaluators, retain uncertainty, and return only the evidence the trial can support.

That office carries no authority to execute unsafe work, select or grant an Animator, authorize spending, repair or mutate a subject, publish, train, or promote. Its findings become input to other owners, never their decision.

No runnable harness, maintained Trial Suite, evaluator or scorer store, capability matrix, benchmark history, pass-at-k experiment, Altar route, or evaluation-driven Dispatcher update is delivered. State of Work owns this maturity boundary.

Execution is not verdict

Riddle keeps trial health separate from evidentiary judgment:

trial status   completed | subject_error | harness_error | evaluator_error | blocked
claim verdict  PASS | PARTIAL | FAIL | CONTRADICTED | UNKNOWN | DISPUTED

Trial status says what happened while attempting the evaluation. Claim verdict says what retained evidence supports. A blocked trial never establishes claim failure; it records that the planned trial could not produce the required observation.

This separation prevents infrastructure faults, subject errors, evaluator failures, and policy blocks from masquerading as capability evidence. It also keeps a favorable verdict from becoming permission, routing authority, causal proof, or automatic promotion.

A Trial Suite (TrialSuite@1) groups Cases and their evaluation controls. A Composition Suite instead forms a versioned graph of separately owned Compositions and typed handoffs. The qualified names are separate contracts, not two meanings of one record.

Choose the evidence passage

Start with Trials when constructing versioned Cases, controls, observations, Rubrics, calibration, repetition, and immutable Outcomes.

When healthy Outcomes must become scoped, expiring evidence for Dispatcher, Toll, or Soulforge to consider under their own authority, continue to Capability claims.

Use Returning findings to trace a downstream failure across an exact Composition Suite and return inert evidence to the smallest supported boundary, without initiating reverse execution.

Riddle names the wound only as far as evidence reaches. It does not take the knife.