PCDVR research · 02 / 02
What changed our interpretation.
A striking result became more informative when a simpler explanation emerged.
From Experiment 21H to 21I
Then we found a simpler explanation.
Rearranging intact portions of trajectories initially appeared to show a dramatic long-range-order effect: accuracy fell to 45.9% while 78.4% of directed adjacency was retained on average. A boundary-control experiment showed that word endings were doing much of the work.
The block-rearrangement test · 21H
1,000 controls per condition.
Randomly cut every >=4-state word into 2, 3, or 4 contiguous blocks, preserve exact order within each block, forbid the original block ordering, and independently permute block order in both reference and challenge sets. Compare with an individual-state shuffle.
93 reference words, 47 challenge words, four families. The two-block shuffle’s central 95% accuracy interval was 34.0%–57.4%; this is a distribution of controls, not a confidence interval for generalization.
Experiment 21I · 93 reference / 47 challenge words
Word endings explain a lot.
A raw final character retained nearly as much family signal as the complete PCDVR trajectory in this dataset. PCDVR preserves spelling structure; these results do not show that it creates additional information.
These bars use tie-aware fractional accuracy: when multiple families tie for best, credit is shared among the tied families if the true family is included. Four-family equal-choice chance is 25%.
Why the scoring detail matters
The raw-final-character and PCDVR-final-state diagnostics each had 19 tied queries out of 47. Deterministic tie-breaking scored both at 72.3%; tie-aware scores were 66.0% and 66.1%. The full trajectory had no ties and scored 33/47 (70.2%) either way.
Preserving endings helps
Means across 500 controls per condition. Keeping the last two states retained more signal than keeping the first two in these tests. Boundary placement is therefore an important alternative explanation for the earlier collapse—not evidence of hidden long-range linguistic structure.
Boundary effects must be compared with raw first/last-character baselines. A strong suffix/end effect can be ordinary orthography rather than a special PCDVR property. These results do not quantify how much independent signal remains after all ordinary spelling effects are controlled.
The next question · Not a reported result
Is anything left after spelling is controlled?
A proposed next experiment would control word endings, length, suffix overlap, edit distance, and character n-grams. The skeptical starting point is that PCDVR is a deterministic recoding of spelling.
No Experiment 22 results are presented here. General linguistic-origin prediction, semantic relationships, and personality or compatibility prediction have not been established by these tests.
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