Across 79 hell games: 4 random guesses, 0 aborts — including this sequence
inside a SINGLE traverse:
Traverse from a5_town_start to a5_nihlathak_portal
rejecting low-confidence A5_TOWN_1 (66.4%) for node 3
rejecting low-confidence A5_TOWN_1 (65.9%) for node 3
rejecting low-confidence A5_TOWN_1 (64.1%) for node 3
taking a random guess towards (-218, 23)
Wanted to select A5_RED_PORTAL, but could not find it
Three rejections is the threshold, so it should have aborted. The check existed,
was correctly indented inside the while loop, and sat before the anti-stuck
block — the placement I verified with a test when I added it. But the loop does
not reliably come back round to the top of the body after a rejection, so the
check was never evaluated at the moment the counter crossed.
That is why the earlier fix looked right and changed nothing: the ordering test
asserted where the check SAT in the source, not that it ever RAN.
Now checked immediately after find_abs_node_pos, in the same iteration the
counter trips, which removes the dependence on control flow entirely. The
original top-of-loop check is left in place as a second chance.
The character ended up outside the Harrogath battlements again, and the game
was lost to a 82s approach — the exact failure the abort was written to
prevent, still happening because the abort was inert.
Tests now assert the counter TRIPS at the threshold, not merely that the code is
ordered correctly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
