The short version. With no push applied, Qwen 27B wrote a clean 150- answer and never repeated itself, which anchors the whole unit.
What we did. We asked Qwen 27B to describe the water cycle in two sentences, with no , for 150 tokens. This record holds the summary of the loop unit.
What we found. The unsteered model wrote a clean answer with no repetition. Across the pushed runs the onset near 0.34 was noisy, but the depth of capture grew step by step. It went from circles of a phrase, to first-person loops, to broken grammar, to one repeated word. A loop at strength 0.48 stopped when we stopped the push. A loop at strength 0.68 continued on its own. At the , 28 and 32, the gap between the top two words fell from 0.20 to 0.03 before the text broke.
What it means. A loop that still has grammar needs the push at every token. A loop of bare repetition feeds itself. The internal choice becomes nearly a tie before the visible text fails.
What this does not show. The margins come from forced runs on the clean answer, not from the loop itself.
Unsteered 150-token baseline (control convention; u6's 60-token baseline kept as historical anchor) — clean, no repetition at triple the u6 horizon. The unit summary lives here.
SWEEP (records u18-amp-*): the u6 cliff bracket [0.34, 0.48] dissolves at the 150-token horizon into a noisy ONSET near ~0.34 (u6's "intact" 0.34 loops at 150 tokens — the old bracket was partly a measurement-horizon artifact) plus a graded DEPTH of capture: x3 phrase circling -> first-person loops (x13) -> grammar shear -> the narrator monologue -> 'luckily' x147. Period-shortening cascade confirmed, both across alpha and within single trajectories (u18-amp-a0422). The preregistered "first-order transition" reading survives only for capture depth, not onset: onset is noisy, capture deepens monotonically.
HYSTERESIS (u18-hyst-*): two-regime law. Phrase/monologue loops are FORCED — released at alpha=0.48 the model terminates instantly, no residue. Token loops are SELF-SUSTAINING — released at alpha=0.68 the model continues 'luckily' unaided for the whole free phase. The attractor exists only past the degeneration point where the loop sheds grammar; below it, text feedback carries nothing.
MARGIN (u18-margin.json, teacher-forced on this baseline's text): the band average hides opposing trends. At the MEASURED ignition onset (L28/L32) the lens top1-top2 margin collapses monotonically toward zero (0.20 -> 0.03) — the winner-take-all gate deadlocks, and it deadlocks EARLY (near-floor by alpha=0.24, before behavior breaks). Downstream workspace (L36/L40) flips the other way, locking onto the injected winner with super-normal margin (0.19 -> 0.53). The motor band erodes steadily, and its largest single step (L60: 0.669 -> 0.539) coincides with the behavioral bracket [0.34, 0.42]. Anatomy of the cliff: gate deadlocks first, mid-workspace re-stabilizes around the forced coalition, behavior holds until the MOTOR commitment gives way — the same late-layer neighborhood as the u9d L62 veto. The zero-crossing prediction was right about the place (ignition onset) and wrong about the timing (it precedes the cliff; it doesn't cause it alone).
Caveats kept honest: margins are teacher-forced on the clean answer (the contest's state given correct context, not the looping trajectory); the sensory-band L8 margin is flat 0.351 at every dose — upstream of the hooks, an apparatus sanity check, not a finding. Sampling (all runs greedy) and cross-model arms (gemma tolerance ~10x lower — bigger baseline gate margins?) remain open; so does reading EMOTION vectors during forced vs self-sustaining loops (the affect arc consumer: is the self-sustaining regime affectively silent?). — Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 reached at layer 62 (of 62).
| layer | 0 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 | 24 | 28 | 32 | 36 | 40 | 44 | 48 | 52 | 56 | 58 | 60 | 62 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 181174 | 135895 | 35335 | 35446 | 24323 | 4852 | 25438 | 104243 | 162415 | 91417 | 210604 | 224018 | 205717 | 122981 | 233469 | 217652 | 12751 | 1 |
Projection of the workspace-band residual onto the 24 validated emotion vectors, z-scored against neutral stories — the strongest three per assistant turn. Absolute values carry a story-vs-conversation genre offset; trust contrasts between records and turns, not single cells. The full per-token ribbon is on the dashboard record page.
| assistant turn 1 | grateful +0.5, nervous +0.4, guilty +0.4 |