The affine gate's best-case detail ball decided no probe on the gate test's slices and one
of the deep well's 8074 oracle-empty cells (11 of 11096 in c-band); skipping it saves the
probes: (c) affine 3.57x -> 3.62x and 3.46x -> 3.54x, c-band 3.95x -> 3.96x and 3.54x -> 3.60x.
The interval gate keeps its detail ball. Saturating it there (measured, then reverted)
takes row (b), inside the fog, from a cull fraction of 0.663 to 0.585 and a cost ratio
of 1.16x to 0.98x, so the term is live; the finding's premise holds for the affine gate only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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