Operational Transition Test (OTT): Experimental Crucible v0.2 - Frozen Prospective Protocol

Abstract

This record contains the frozen prospective protocol for version 0.2.0 of the Operational Transition Test (OTT), developed to test whether a proposed operational criterion can distinguish genuine cross-level operational transitions from predictive compression, arbitrary aggregation, aliases, insufficient cost reduction, semantically invalid macros, brittle macros, and hidden cost export. All hypotheses, thresholds, benchmark families, development/evaluation allocation rules, resource accounting rules, baseline comparisons, ablations, and failure criteria were frozen before the prospective benchmark was executed. At the time of this deposit, the prospective experiment has NOT been run. The purpose of this Zenodo deposit is to establish a public, independently timestamped state of the protocol before development and evaluation results are observed. Lineage. This record continues Gątkowski (2026), When Output Becomes Infrastructure: Operational Compilation and a Falsifiable Test for Cross-Level Transitions, v0.1.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22115305, published as a new version of the same concept record. Licensing. Mixed-license research package (authoritative map: LICENSES.md inside the archive): scientific text, protocol, documentation, and benchmark data — CC BY 4.0 (record license); software (src/, executable scripts, tests/) — Apache License 2.0. Copyright © 2026 Sławomir Grzegorz Gątkowski. Integrity (SHA-256). ZIP archive: f5a07ac0f10905bb5b5d166d2e62e9c9b1f3e63537eb9053bbdb0568ba4796e2; manuscript PDF: d1b14830dbd0007f8f247f063b97f4d1305e00234986656d70a76cfbfa37764e; canonical protocol root: 2e0072efdde5649ec40b3bfc1fa2403f8007e940709654971c45f44bd5bc9566. All hashes verified before publication. Experimental state. PROTOCOL PUBLICLY FROZEN — EXPERIMENT NOT RUN. No development cases were executed, no evaluation cases were executed, no scoring was performed, no thresholds were changed, no RUN_AUTHORIZATION was created for this deposit.