Oscillation Detection

What Is Oscillation?

A goal oscillates when it alternates between passing and failing across evolve cycles. Typically this means the fix for the goal causes a side-effect that breaks something else, which gets reverted, which re-exposes the original failure — creating a loop.

Example from cycle-history.jsonl:

cycle 5:  goal-X → improved
cycle 8:  goal-X → fail
cycle 12: goal-X → improved
cycle 15: goal-X → fail

Detection

Count improved→fail transitions for the same target in .agents/evolve/cycle-history.jsonl:

# Count oscillations for a given goal — reads via BC3 LoopReaderPort
# (soc-y5vh.4 wrapper) instead of inline JSONL slurp.
scripts/evolve-read-cycle-history.sh recent 0 \
  | jq -r "select(.target==\"$GOAL_ID\") | .result" \
  | awk 'prev=="improved" && $0=="fail" {count++} {prev=$0} END {print count+0}'

Threshold

3 oscillations (improved→fail transitions) within a single session triggers quarantine. The goal is skipped in Step 3 selection.

Effect

Quarantined goals are skipped during work selection (Step 3)
Skipping a quarantined goal counts as idle (no actionable work found)
The quarantine is session-scoped — a new session resets the count
Quarantine events are logged in cycle-history.jsonl with "result": "quarantined"

Recovery

Human identifies the root cause (usually a conflict between two goals)
Fix the underlying issue manually
Start a new evolve session (quarantine resets)
Or: remove the quarantine by deleting the goal from the skip list

Why Not Just Increase the Skip Threshold?

The 3-consecutive-regression skip in Step 3 only catches monotonic failure. Oscillation is worse — it burns cycles alternating between "fixed" and "broken" without the stagnation detector ever triggering (because the goal intermittently passes). The oscillation detector catches this pattern explicitly.

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