AI REVIEW SUMMARY | 9 NOVEMBER 2026

Scope: When Checking Takes Time: An Exact Two-Probe Stopping Frontier, version 1.0. These were independent internal AI passes with separate reviewer contexts. They are not human peer review, priority certification, physical validation or publication acceptance. Raw reports are retained privately for provenance; this summary gives the reader-relevant findings.

Prior-work pass: retain a technical addendum. Costly hidden-state sampling, Bayesian stopping, nonmyopic sensing, observation-before-hazard updating and compiled equality have antecedents. The defensible increment is the stated closed-form finite frontier and its certificate. Full Monahan access was unavailable and the 2013 Ahmad/Yu PDF had an unsupported-format error. No exact matching formula was identified in inspected passages, which does not establish priority.

Proof pass: no supported major mathematical objection. Independently derived terminal loss, branch dominance, complete full-domain policy reduction, endpoint ties, and strict-benefit inequality. A fresh implementation used both history-indexed 38-policy/64-outcome enumeration and joint-probability Bellman recursion. All 160 exact cases and worked fixtures passed. Finite tests corroborate the analytic proof.

Hostile pass: no supported major mathematical or interpretive objection to technical-addendum scope. Specifically challenged timing, terminal loss, nonnegative-cost domain, random-policy reduction, endpoints and uniqueness, the harmful-first-check example, optional-versus-executed checks, and unsupported architecture/awareness claims. Seven supplementary exact Bellman checks passed. The reviewer does not recommend a major standalone-paper claim.

Revisions: corrected the acquisition-paper title; made the 2013 source explicitly abstract-only and cited the distinct2014 full-text source separately; changed 'unlabelled tree shapes' to 'observation-ordered stopping patterns before assigning terminal forecasts'. The final hostile re-review confirmed the source objections and stopping-pattern wording resolved, with no supported major objection remaining. No mathematical claim was broadened.

Final manuscript text reviewed SHA256: fce377c34a23c9ed53275205723bef94a6b0578385ecca9e956fba27c746b9c3.

Open limits: historical priority remains unverified; only the stated two-probe, fixed-prior/noise, symmetric-known-transition, no-final-delay contract is solved. No physical validation, implementation-resource advantage, subjective-consciousness inference, or universal value-of-reflection claim follows.
