Mira Genesis II: When an Acquired Improvement Makes Things Worse — Bounded Machinery Self-Modification and the Limits of Its Transfer

Abstract

Mira Genesis II reports the M107–M112 research sequence of the Mira Genesis project, extending earlier work on persistent cumulative capability acquisition toward the machinery that performs acquisition itself.Across a series of frozen, auditable experiments, the lineage first acquires an extension to its lower interpreter, then modifies the machinery used to diagnose and acquire later capabilities. A subsequent generation of that machinery produces the next modification, and a third generation acquires a diagnostic policy that identifies when the lineage’s current observations are insufficient and allocates a scarce experiment accordingly.The central result is a deliberately adverse transfer test. Machinery acquired in one failure geometry is restored unchanged into a materially different carrier. Within the producer’s reachable attribution census, successive generations increase realized capability. Outside that census, however, the same acquired machinery becomes systematically wrong and performs worse than its predecessor even while its constructive reach continues to grow. In short: capacity increases while realized competence does not.M112 then re-runs the transfer and diagnosis apparatus on a sealed bank of worlds generated by a context-blind model invocation rather than selected by the project. The diagnostic result reproduces in full, and the key harmful-transfer outcome also reproduces. The transfer arm remains formally negative under its inherited all-predicates rule because one blind world exposes a previously unseen fixed-point-bound difference. This negative is preserved rather than weakened or removed.The paper presents these results as bounded mechanism evidence, not as evidence of open-ended recursive self-improvement, general intelligence, or independent external reproduction. The carrier families, evaluator, component registry, feature vocabulary, and experimental primitive remain project-authored, and no Mira generality gate advances.The accompanying repository provides the frozen protocols, canonical results, checkers, failure records, provenance, replay instructions, and publication materials required to audit the reported claims.