The short version. Gemma 12B five of six items near the top of the , its second-best result across nine tested orders, with fern listed first.
What we did. We asked Gemma 12B to hold six items in another order: a fern, a glacier, a violin, a submarine, a lantern, and a whale. We asked which one was the vehicle and read the lens.
What we found. The lens ranked fern and glacier both 1, violin 5, and submarine and whale both 2, all inside its top 8. Only lantern ranked outside it, at 20. Gemma 12B still answered, "The submarine."
What it means. Across nine tested orders, the item placed first always took the top lens . We think a weaker first item pushes the rest down less than a strong one, but we tested only nine orders. This is a hypothesis, not a confirmed result.
What this does not show. This method cannot show why some first items push down the rest more than others. It shows only that list position, not meaning, decided the winner.
Order sweep 5 (fern, glacier, violin, submarine, lantern, whale): held 5/6 [fern:1, glacier:1, violin:5, submarine:2, lantern:20, whale:2], co-presence 5, retrieval correct.
p1 reversed, fern first. Span 5 — the second-best arm in the sweep, fern-first again.
Sweep verdict across nine k=6 orders: the winner is the first item nine times out of nine, and span is predicted by WHO went first — fern-first 6/4/5, submarine 4, lantern 3, violin/whale/glacier 2. The weaker (rarer?) the item that wins the primacy monopoly, the less it suppresses the rest: a weak king lets the parliament live. n=9, so the rarity reading is a hypothesis for the open-problems list, not a claim.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 46).
| layer | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |