2026-08-01 — Scaling-law extension of the deposit: the price of a decision. Chapter 35 established that the collective balances the thermally unstable burn equilibrium (T* = 3.59 keV, e-folding time tau = 30.5 s); this chapter measures the quantitative law behind that result, entirely on the fourth-ISA hardware (classic ESP32, Xtensa LX6, Q16 collapse on chip): 1 130 closed-loop episodes over four single-factor axes around the chapter-35 reference (decision interval 0.5–24 s, sensor noise 1–32 %, engine coupling 0.02–0.4, engine population 10–300) and a two-factor decision-rate × noise grid at 20 seeds per cell, scored strictly — a run counts as held only if its final 100 s stay within 25 % of T*. The natural control variable is tau/dt, decisions per e-folding time of the instability. The law in three statements. EXISTENCE: at 1 % sensor noise the point is held down to ~4.3 decisions per e-folding time and lost below — close to the theoretical floor for sampled control of an unstable pole. THE PRICE OF NOISE: the 50 %-survival boundary migrates as tau/dt_crit ≈ 10.3 + 1.33 ln(sigma) — about +0.9 decisions per e-fold for every doubling of sensor noise; disturbance variety is paid for with decision variety at a measured exchange rate, and at 16 % noise the boundary frays (isolated losses even at tau/dt = 15: one unlucky draw near the unstable point suffices — survival becomes stochastic rather than deterministic). PRECISION: the closed-loop temperature scatter follows the sensor noise at gain 0.8–1.0 (never amplified across a 32× range) and diverges at the existence boundary — between the quality threshold (tau/dt ≈ 15) and the existence threshold the point is held but trembling, a regime documented tick-by-tick. The chapter-35 operating configuration (1 Hz, tau/dt = 30) is thereby located: a factor ~7 above the 1 %-noise boundary — its margin is now a number, not an impression. Two methodological notes are declared in full: an earlier end-time scoring rule silently failed for decision intervals that do not divide the episode length and produced a spurious non-monotonic cliff (the shipped rule is tick-spacing-relative), and the engine-population axis is STRUCTURALLY degenerate at engine temperature 0 — population-10 and population-100 episodes are byte-identical (verified by file comparison), so its flatness is a property of the deterministic configuration and is declared as such, not sold as an empirical robustness finding; the coupling axis carries no such degeneracy and its flatness across 20× is a measured result. Alongside the law, a deliberate negative result closes the open question of chapters 31/32: a Greenwald ramp-window protection overlay (gas push-down escalating with fGW level AND rise rate, plus an Ip lift while fGW is critical, since the Greenwald limit scales with current) was tested PAIRED — 20 identical seeds at XHARD severity 5, with and without the overlay, on the same chip: 15/20 both arms, one marginal seed saved, one marginal seed lost, no effect. The reason is structural, not a tuning failure: a stuck-open valve drives fGW from ~0.5 to the 1.5 criterion within two ticks while the Ip lift moves the limit by ~3 % per tick where ~50 % would be needed — machine protection for this window belongs in hardware interlocks, not in any command-side policy, closing the question with an experiment rather than an assertion. Chapter 36 of the master document (8 pages, 5 figures, A4) is inline-embedded in Bernd01.08.2026.pdf and reproduces every reported number from the CSVs in 02_data/36_decision_rate/. The aggregate deposit now contains 12 378 reproducible episodes across 46 (date × study × policy) groups. All measurement data and figures released under CC-BY-4.0 / CC0; 2026-07-30 — Unstable-branch extension of the deposit: the collective leaves the stable operating points. After stabilise (chapters 29–32), optimise (chapter 33) and regulate (chapter 34), the controller now BALANCES — it holds the thermally unstable equilibrium of the ignition curve, the inverted pendulum of burn control, on which every prior chapter's operating point sat on the stable side. The claim is deliberately placed on the canonical 0D burn model rather than on TORAX: Bosch–Hale D-T reactivity (verified against the published value at 10 keV, 1.136 × 10⁻²² m³/s), IPB98(y,2) confinement with its P^−0.69 degradation, bremsstrahlung, and profile-INTEGRATED alpha power over declared parabolic profiles (nu_T = 1.5, nu_n = 0.3) — no free parameters, so the unstable equilibrium is analytic, not asserted. At the reference point (n = 0.9 × 10²⁰ m⁻³, P_aux = 5 MW) the model has three equilibria — 0.65 keV stable, T* = 3.59 keV UNSTABLE with analytic e-folding time 30.5 s, 6.82 keV stable — and open-loop releases at ±1 % from T* e-fold away with fitted tau = 29 s (up) and 33 s (down). The controller is the unchanged five-agent Q16 chain on a FOURTH verified instruction-set architecture: a classic ESP32 (Xtensa LX6, ESP32-2432S028R 2.8-inch display board, CH340 UART, 10.4 ms measured round trip), transfer function verified against the analytic collapse formula to 6 × 10⁻⁵ — the same bound as the RISC-V reference — extending the bit-equivalence chain to ARM Cortex-M4, Xtensa LX7, RISC-V and Xtensa LX6; a new telemetry frame renders the trajectory live on the board's own panel while the control path stays byte-identical, and three sev = 5 TORAX full-pulse closed-loop seeds on the LX6 reproduce the C3 reference behaviour (two full 1 199 s pulses at Q ≈ 11.9 absorbing ~2 250 adversarial events each; one chapter-31-class ramp-window death). The battery: 380 runs, 20 seeds per case, 1 % sensor noise, 1 Hz control ticks (~30 decisions per e-folding time). Uncontrolled, the point tips in 20/20 runs. Nominal, all three controllers hold (collective, tuned single-channel PID — the literature-standard burn controller — and bang-bang, all 100 % within ±5 % of T*). Under confinement drift H98 × 0.70–1.30 WITHOUT retuning, the collective holds 100 % in-band in every case with zero lost runs across the entire battery; the PID settles off target at ×0.70, parks on the hot branch at ×1.15 and loses 20/20 at ×1.30; bang-bang loses 20/20 at ×1.30. In the release–recapture experiment (actuators frozen at the nominal point for 250 s — the identical provably-unstable free drift for every controller — then re-engaged) the collective recaptures 20/20 with mean recapture time 48 ± 14 s; the PID recaptures 12/20 and bang-bang 4/20, and the asymmetry is structural rather than statistical: on the hot branch P_aux = 0 still leaves a self-sustained 6.0 keV burn, so heating-only authority is provably powerless and descent requires the fueling and impurity brakes, which the collective engages and afterwards retires to nominal (the four bang-bang runs that happened to tip cold recover with 96 % band time, reported for completeness). One controller-design finding is documented: the first hardware release-recapture exposed a standoff — P_aux parked at 14 MW against Z_eff = 2.1 — that the float simulation had missed (int16 quantisation selects a different trajectory), resolved by a CO-ACTIVATION cleanup term proportional to the product of heating excess and brake excess, which retires opposing actuators without touching legitimate single-sided drift offsets. A 35-point TORAX 1.4 open-loop grid is shipped as an honest footnote: the bundled imposed-pedestal full-pulse scenario parks every point on the ignited branch (219–306 MW even at zero NBI) and does not resolve the unstable branch; it was not re-engineered to force one. Declared limitations, stated in full in the chapter: 0D energy balance (no transport profile dynamics, no MHD), imposed confinement scaling, helium ash not yet self-consistent, and no ITER applicability claim — the claim is the narrower one that a provably unstable burn equilibrium of the canonical model is balanced, model-free and without retuning, by five 12-byte integer agents on a 3-euro microcontroller, against baselines that demonstrably cannot. Chapter 35 of the master document (10 pages, 5 figures and a device photograph page, A4) is inline-embedded in Bernd30.07.2026.pdf and reproduces every reported number from the CSVs in 02_data/35_burn_instability/. The aggregate deposit now contains 11 208 reproducible episodes across 43 (date × study × policy) groups. All measurement data and figures released under CC-BY-4.0 / CC0; only the QITE Core SDK itself remains proprietary (DPMA Aktenzeichen 10 2025 003 906.9 and 10 2025 004 891.2). Full technical specification in chapter 35. 2026-07-27 — Burn-control extension of the deposit: the collective's third discipline. After stabilise (chapters 29–32) and optimise (chapter 33), the controller now REGULATES — it accepts an externally imposed P_fusion setpoint, entering as one additional evidence term in the lambda mappings; kernel, firmware and chip remain byte-identical. Newly instrumented: per-tick P_alpha, P_fusion, P_external and P_ohmic, and the unclamped fusion gain (the former Q = 20 reporting bound is retired after proving bit-identical control either way: all Q-dependent lambda terms saturate at the bound; the nominal burn in truth runs at Q ≈ 200–580 against a ~0.3 MW ohmic denominator, which is why absolute powers, not Q, are reported from here on). Five studies. Baseline (no objective): 130 MW. v1 unconstrained maximisation: 677 ± 19 MW at Ip = 15 MA held for 20 000 s — declared OUT of the engineering envelope (no CS flux-swing limit, no helium ash, no MHD in 1D transport) and retained only as the model's upper envelope. v2 with realism guards (Ip capped at 12 MA, q_min > 1 actively enforced, an ash proxy growing to +2.0 radiation multiplier at 5 TJ fluence): 354 ± 13 MW held flat through the entire ash ramp — the strongest quarter is the last — with the controller autonomously retiring its own impurity command one-for-one as the ash grows; declared: the proxy acts through the controllable channel, so this is a control-loop result, not an ash-physics result, and the settled operating point matching the ITER hybrid-scenario class is bounded by the circularity that the 12 MA cap comes from that literature. Capacity probe at XHARD sev = 2: the unbounded ELM radiation channel (multiplier up to 6, three times the controller's own maximum) caps the achievable burn at 26.3 ± 9.3 MW regardless of policy. Setpoint tracking at sev = 2: asked for 20 MW below the 26 MW capacity, three independent seeds deliver 18.2 / 18.3 / 18.2 (± 4.5) MW over 10 000 s each — deliberate under-delivery proving bidirectional regulation — at HALF the unregulated variance, P90 braked from 37 to 24 MW, 68 % of ticks inside the ±5 MW band, zero disruptions. Extreme severities: at sev = 8 the overlay does not impair survival (21 MW sustained where no hot burn can establish); the single disruption on record is a chapter-31-class ramp-window death at sev = 10 (t = 83 s, Greenwald criterion, before any burn existed), shipped as the survival boundary. Every reported number is computed at build time from the shipped CSVs and passed an independent recomputation audit. Also in this period: the TORAX safety_factor_fit fix (PR #2288, merged 2026-07-16 following issue #2284) was verified by the reporter against the original reproducer — negative q_min at t = 60–62 s on 1.4.0 becomes a smooth positive trace on current main ("not reproduced", exit 0); note that PyPI release 1.4.3 does not yet contain the fix; this deposit remains declared on TORAX 1.4.0 with the documented rate-gate sanitizer. Chapter 34 of the master document (8 pages, 5 figures, A4) is inline-embedded in Bernd27.07.2026.pdf and reproduces every reported number from the CSVs in 02_data/34_burn_control/. The aggregate deposit now contains 10 786 reproducible episodes across 32 (date × study × policy) groups. All measurement data and figures released under CC-BY-4.0 / CC0; only the QITE Core SDK itself remains proprietary (DPMA Aktenzeichen 10 2025 003 906.9 and 10 2025 004 891.2). Full technical specification in chapter 34. 2026-07-19 — Second-machine extension of the deposit: the GOLEM tokamak (CTU Prague, R = 0.4 m, a = 0.085 m, Bt 1.5) inside the early ramp (t ≤ 83 s), and every dead seed still shows its initial-condition β_N and q_min at the moment of disruption — the plasma is healthy until a valve-stuck-fully-open event lands inside the low-Greenwald ramp window, machine-protection territory rather than plasma control. No seed at any severity ever died after the controller blend completed, and survivors are statistically indistinguishable across severities (Q_fus mean 11.66 / 11.77 / 11.76, H98 1.71 / 1.68 / 1.69, q_min floor 1.61 / 1.77 / 1.80 at sev 1 / 5 / 10) while the absorbed adversarial load triples (784 → 2 281 events per episode; at sev ≥ 5 every control tick carries an ELM and ~40 % of heating commands drop out): severity does not degrade the controller, it raises the probability of an uncontrollable window hit, and the outcome is strictly binary — die inside the ramp window or complete the full pulse. Declared limitation, stated in full in the chapter: this chapter introduces scoring-rule generation v2, which adds the single-tick Greenwald density criterion; the earlier flat-top chapters were scored under v1 without a density-limit criterion and remain unchanged under their declared rules — survival rates across chapters must be compared per rule generation. The blend controller and the hardware-bounds clamp are additive throughout; every published XHARD and nominal result is byte-for-byte unchanged. Chapter 31 of the master document (8 pages, 5 figures, A4) is inline-embedded in Bernd15.07.2026.pdf and reproduces every reported number from the CSVs in 02_data/31_c3_q16_fullpulse_hb/. The aggregate deposit now contains 10 674 reproducible episodes across 23 (date × study × policy) groups. All measurement data and figures released under CC-BY-4.0 / CC0; only the QITE Core SDK itself remains proprietary. 2026-07-13 — Full-pulse extension of the deposit: the controller drives the complete ITER pulse envelope — cold start, current rampup, L-H transition, ignition and self-heated burn — in one continuous closed-loop simulation on the same physical 2 EUR ESP32-C3 (RISC-V) chip as the 2026-07-04 chapter. Starting from the TORAX 1.4 bundled iterhybrid_rampup configuration (Ip = 3 MA, T = 6 keV core, L-mode pedestal), the deterministic five-agent QITE-Q16 controller ramps the plasma current from 3 MA to ~8 MA under its own authority (heating throttled by a dedicated rampup-phase lambda set, gas held Greenwald-aware, impurity off), hands over to the flat-top lambda set through a one-way phase latch shared coherently by all five actuator agents (trigger: q95 5 in the Hybrid envelope of van Mulders 2021). The open-loop reference again 'survives' 100 / 100 only by saturating in L-mode at Q = 3.61 (H98 = 0.80); the uniform-random baseline disrupts in 100 / 100 attempts. By the standard engineering stress-margin inference, the controller's survival of the IterHybrid-XHARD cascade — calibrated at one to two orders of magnitude above documented ITER worst-case projections (Snipes 2017) — over the full ITER pulse duration plausibly supports survival at nominal 1× conditions with a much larger margin. This is not a formal hardware-deployment proof; real-tokamak validation remains out of scope. The 1200 s block is published as a second data folder (1200s_full_iter_pulse/) alongside the existing 150 s block, under CC-BY-4.0 / CC0. The original 150 s data and figures from the 2026-06-07 version remain accessible via the version history of this Zenodo record. Full technical specification of the 9-page extension paper. 2026-06-07 — Adversarial control-theory stress benchmark of the QITE multi-agent plasma controller on the native Google DeepMind TORAX 1.4 step-level API (Citrin et al., 2024) under the deliberately exaggerated IterHybrid-XHARD disturbance cascade. The benchmark imposes seven simultaneously active stochastic disturbance processes on the ITER Hybrid scenario at 12 MA / 5.3 T (Polevoi 2005, van Mulders 2021), each calibrated above its real-ITER analogue by between one and two orders of magnitude: ELM crashes every 5 s with a 15 % radiation spike, NBI dropouts at 20 % per control tick, ECRH dropouts at 15 % per tick, Z_eff random walk with σ = 0.15 s⁻¹, gas-puff flow noise five times nominal, actuator command noise σ = 5 %, actuator slew rates halved relative to the ITER emergency-mode envelope (Snipes 2017 §5 Tab 3). Over 300 reproducible episodes (3 policies × 100 actuator-noise seeds), the deterministic five-agent QITE controller — implementing the ITER PCS Tier-1 hierarchy (Ip, NBI, ECRH, gas puff) plus the Tier-2 Disruption Mitigation System via the Mavrin impurity-radiation proxy (Lehnen 2015 §4, Hollmann 2015) — delivers 88 / 100 disruption-free episodes at the physically-correct Hybrid operating point Q_fus = 7.94 ± 1.26 in H-mode confinement (H98 = 2.13 ± 0.40), absorbing 90.5 ± 20.7 stacked adversarial events per episode. The open-loop reference 'survives' 100 / 100 only by saturating in L-mode at Q = 3.60 ± 0.00 (H98 = 0.80 ± 0.00); the uniform-random baseline disrupts in 100 / 100 attempts at Q = 23.32 ± 13.55. A Welch two-sample t-test on Q_mean of survivors yields p = 1.06 × 10⁻⁹⁸ against the open-loop reference, and Fisher exact on survival counts yields p < 10⁻³⁰ against the random baseline — the QITE distribution is statistically separated from every baseline at p < 10⁻¹³. Operating-point trajectories sit with substantial safety margin both below the Troyon no-wall β_N limit (β_N max = 1.41 ± 0.09 vs 3.0 hard limit) and above the sawtooth + 2/1 NTM lock threshold on q_min (La Haye 2006); the architectural advantage is shown to come from the Tier-1 + Tier-2 actuator hierarchy and the shared emergent collective field, not from threshold tuning specific to the adversarial scenario — the controller configuration is the off-the-shelf five-agent QITE emergency-mode setup with the cited per-actuator lambda mapping, applied without modification. The complete adversarial-benchmark deposit — 300 per-tick CSV logs of all episodes, configuration and run metadata, aggregate statistics, headline statistical tests, nine reproduced figures, and full disturbance-cascade and scenario specification — is published openly under CC-BY-4.0 / CC0; only the QITE Core SDK itself remains proprietary, and no engine internals are required to reproduce any reported number from the included CSV logs. Full technical specification of the 9-page benchmark paper. External validation of the QITE multi-agent plasma controller against the third-party Google DeepMind TORAX simulator (Citrin et al., 2024) via the gymtorax 1.0.0 reinforcement-learning wrapper (Mouchamps et al., 2026). Over 30 reproducible episodes on gymtorax/IterHybrid-v0 (3 policies × 10 seeds, ITER-hardware-realistic actuator noise σ = 0.5 % per Hemsworth 2017, Henderson 2020, Mitchell 2008) the QITE policy delivers a mean end-of-scenario fusion gain of Q = 8.57 ± 6.34, against Q = 7.69 ± 0.03 for the open-loop IterHybridAgent reference and Q = 2.22 ± 0.79 for a uniform-random baseline — +11.5 % above the reference at simultaneously 36 % larger Troyon-limit margin (β_N = 1.25 vs 1.94) and factor 2.7 larger sawtooth-onset margin (q_min = 1.70 vs 0.625). No disruptions occurred for any policy across the 30 episodes. The QITE engines sustained 4.21 × 10⁹ decisions per second across 5.285 × 10¹¹ total decisions in 445 seconds wall time. A previously unobserved bimodal operating-point behaviour of the closed-loop QITE controller is documented and discussed. The complete external-validation deposit — application source, per-step CSV logs of all 30 episodes, aggregate statistics, and tick-by-tick replay animations — is published openly under MIT / CC-BY-4.0 / CC0; only the QITE Core SDK itself remains proprietary. Full technical specification of the 22-page companion paper Interdisciplinary treatise on the mathematical, physical, and information-theoretic foundations of the QITE formalism and its application to the real-time stabilization of magnetically confined fusion plasmas. 258 pages, 20 chapters, 4 appendices. Topics: spectral theory, Lyapunov stability, Grad–Shafranov equilibrium, MHD stability theory, neoclassical and anomalous transport, disruption avoidance, zero-allocation C++17 implementation, CUDA parallelization, ITER baseline simulation with 1,536 coupled QITE engines on a 128×192 grid. Validation against the IPB98(y,2) scaling law, the Greenwald density limit, and experimental data (JET, DIII-D). German patent applications Az. 10 2025 003 906.9 and Az. 10 2025 004 891.2. The deposit additionally includes the executable reference implementation tokamak_sim in two prebuilt variants — tokamak_sim.exe (CPU, MSVC x64) and tokamak_sim_cuda.exe (CUDA 13.1, GPU-accelerated 1,536-engine sensor swarm at ~10⁹ QITE decisions per second) — together with full source (C++17 + CUDA), CMake/MSVC build scripts, and a 22-page companion paper (Simulation.pdf) extending the main treatise. The simulation environment couples the deterministic plasma physics layer (Bosch–Hale D-T reactivity, Modified Rutherford NTM dynamics, peeling-ballooning ELMs, Putterich impurity radiation, Sauter bootstrap current, Connor–Hastie runaway model) to a three-tier control hierarchy: a 1,536-engine QITE sensor swarm (treatise §7.2), a six-engine actuator-agent layer (NBI, ECRH, ICRH, gas-puffing, vertical PF coils, shattered-pellet injection — companion §3) governing all physical actuators autonomously through their individual coherence dynamics, and a parallel six-mechanism stochastic perturbation channel (ELM Poisson process, NTM onset roulette, Brownian vertical drift, NBI source glitches, sensor noise, locked-mode onset — companion §4) reproducing the operationally relevant statistical character of a real tokamak plasma. Empirical validation over a 390 s flat-top run (default seed 0xC0FFEE, severity σ=1.0, all stochastic mechanisms active, no operator interventions) reproduces the steady-state envelope of treatise §11.10 essentially exactly: disruption risk 26.7 % ± 4.7 %, no excursion above 32 %, zero terminal disruptions, mean fusion power 488 MW (within 2.4 % of the ITER design point of 500 MW), β_N=1.73, and a saturated (2,1)-NTM amplitude of 0.201, consistent with stochastically driven flat-top operation. Full bit-identical replication is supported through fixed-seed semantics and the run metadata persisted in every CSV log header.