Summarizes the 13-cycle trap-exploration session: BC pretrain (heuristic
clone) is the self-play ceiling under our compute budget (1 GPU + 50
sims + 768x4 MLP). All variants (naive finetune, KL anchor, mirror
descent, mixed-opponent + opponent-aware search) either preserved BC
(~17-21/100 vs heuristic-cautious) or regressed to catastrophic
forgetting. The single largest improvement of the session — 4× win rate
on the same checkpoint — came from PUCT Q-value normalization at search
time, not from any learning change.
Records the mechanism (negative training signal from BC-vs-heuristic
games; search too shallow to find heuristic-beating moves), the
hypotheses we negated, and the dials left in code for future runs with
more compute.
