Campaign overview
Audience: strangers who want the plot, not the ops manual.
Evidence state: 2026-07-16 · 3/3 claim-stack candidates under F1_seal.
Live report: https://nocap.think2earn.com
Detail timeline: CAMPAIGN_TIMELINE.html · Failures: FAILURE_LEDGER.html
Numbers from sealed summaries — under-claim; no trophy language.
One-line spine
Failed finals → fair clock + F1_seal → Muon compose misses → bank systems + cheap split → Tier A keeps defaults → claim-stack 3/3 under sealed F1 (candidate vs F1, not matched stock speedup).
What the challenge is
Train GPT-2 ≈124M on FineWeb until official disjoint val ≤ 3.3821, on one GPU, with less first-passage train time than a stock baseline. This campaign’s public comparator is our sealed stock AdamW run F1_seal (T=3.866 h on Clock-W).
1 — Early finals
| Run | Outcome | Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
| F2 (short warmdown) | Terminal ≈ 3.405 · never crossed | Quality miss. |
| F2b (long warmdown) | Crossed @4736 · terminal ≈ 3.377 | Quality hit. Historical wall ≈ −2.9% vs notebook F1 retracted as speed (infra/noise). |
Notebook-era historical F1 (~229.1 min) exists but torch was unlogged → provisional only.
2 — Fair-clock reform
Unpinned torch builds drifted step time (~6% observed). Speed claims now require:
- GPU A100-SXM4-40GB
- torch 2.13.0+cu130
- T = train_time at first val_disjoint ≤ 3.3821
- Public denom = F1_seal only
F1_seal (Clock-W): stock AdamW · cross @4736 · val 3.381538 · T=3.866 h.
3 — Full claims that did not under-baseline
| Run | Quality | Speed vs F1_seal |
|---|---|---|
| claim_muon_par | Miss (final 3.386130, never crossed) | N/A |
| claim_muon_wsd | Hit (~3.376 terminal) | T≈3.899 h · ~0.8% slower |
Board-v3 800-step screens: no promote. Proxies are not claims.
4 — Component bank (research workspaces)
On Research-W\* accounts, levers were screened and banked:
- B32×accum16 systems path: ~6% faster core step vs B16 (tokens/update fixed).
- Timing-cheap split-QKV: multi-seed mechanism repeat @800 · persistence @2400 (Research-W4 seed 5151).
- Many closed NO-GOs: curation cleaners, Adam LR 0.003 alone, dual-polar split, muon_lr 0.025, NS6, warmdown 300, late EMA as train CE, Tier A mom/WD/warmdown variants.
Through 2026-07-14 evening: bank existed; 0 under-baseline full recipes yet.
5 — Claim-stack seals
Recipe: Keller Jordan Muon + B32 path + timing-cheap split-QKV candidate, vs joint-QKV stock control on the same stack, full 4768.
| Seed | Workspace | Candidate T | vs F1_seal | Stock control |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1337 | Claim-W1 | 3.553 h | +8.1% | matched · never crossed |
| 2029 | Claim-W2 | 3.567 h | +7.7% | matched · never crossed |
| 4242 | Claim-W1 | 3.511 h | +9.2% | not run (candidate-only) |
All candidates first-cross at step 4736. Mean T ≈ 3.544 h · mean ΔT% ≈ +8.3%.
Same-workspace AdamW check F1_Claim-W2 on Claim-W2: T=3.858 h (~+0.2% vs F1_seal).
Hard honesty: do not claim matched speedup vs joint stock — stock never crossed where measured.
What strangers should remember
- Multi-seed under-baseline vs sealed F1 is sealed and documented.
- That is campaign evidence under sealed F1.
- Failures stay visible (FAILURE_LEDGER.html).
- Attribution: Muon → Keller Jordan; timing-cheap split-QKV → this campaign’s banked mechanism.
Next step in the public narrative: package the writeup / submission — not more GPUs unless an operator asks.