The steps of the engine

Nine named agent steps, each with a role: from goal formalization to execution drilldown, then a critic and a ranking.

Step 1, the Initiator (goal formalization), turns the objective into the master question. Step 2, the Immortalist Architect (goal pillars synthesis), decomposes it into goal pillars and writes the bridge lexicon. Step 3, the Requirements Engineer (requirement atomization), turns each pillar into requirement atoms. Step 4a, the Domain Mapper, names eight to twelve research domains; step 4b, the Domain Specialist, fans out over each domain to collect fifteen to twenty-five established scientific pillars. Step 4 takes about three quarters of a run's wall clock.

Step 5, the Judge, is disabled; its strategic matching of science to requirements was folded into step 4b. Step 6, the Strategic Science Officer (frontier question generation), writes the gap questions. Step 7, the Instantiation Gatekeeper, writes maximally divergent hypotheses for each gap. Step 8, the Lead Investigative Officer (tactical decomposition), writes the discriminating questions. Step 9, the Lead Tactical Engineer (execution drilldown), writes the leaf experiments with their system, intervention, meter and time. After step 9 the Genius Experiment Critic improves and rejects, and the best-experiments selector ranks a portfolio. Step 10, the Convergence Critic, is disabled.

The run report renumbers for the reader: the engine's steps 6 to 9 appear as 5 to 8, followed by "Review outcome" and "Run summary". Both numberings are in use, so a step number alone is ambiguous without saying which scheme is meant.