(2) Valeri: 'similarity should solve the flat-family problem'. The similarity of two successive contraction ratios, min/max(rho_n, rho_n-1), was pre-declared as the detector; it FAILS and is inverted - AUC 0.28-0.42 flat against the rest, and 'the contraction did not speed up' fires more on APS (37.6%) than on the flat families (28.2%). The rho sequence shows why: on x^m the method runs a period-4 cycle - two Newton undershoots at exactly (1-1/m)^m (0.328 for m=5, 0.346 for m=9), one crossing, one nearly empty step (rho ~ 1) - so successive ratios are dissimilar, not constant. The safeguard is not the cause: the steps are as proposed. Candidate detectors suggested by the cycle are new hypotheses, not built.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
