mechanical-compiler/docs/ACCEPTANCE.md

ACCEPTANCE.md

What the acceptance suite asserts, and to what tolerance.

This document exists because until now the answer lived in two places, neither of them readable: a tolerance block inside a hashed JSON fixture, and one line of test_oracle.py. A person asking "how close does the port have to be?" had to read code to find out, and the reason for the numbers was nowhere.

Last updated 2026-09-13. Section 7's correction landed; F-034 closed 2026-08-22.

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1. What is being compared

The port is measured against a frozen 123-case oracle generated by the OpenSCAD reference at revision 8.0.0, under OpenSCAD 2021.01 with BOSL2 92d697c2. 113 cases the reference accepted, 10 it rejected.

The oracle does not record full-precision geometry. It records what OpenSCAD's echo printed, which is C's %g at default precision — six significant figures. That fact is load-bearing and most of this document follows from it.

2. Two tolerance regimes

Regime A — declared absolute. The oracle's own tolerance block: lengths_mm = 1e-4, areas_mm2 = 1e-3. Applies to every compared float except the three keys named below.

Regime B — six-significant-figure last place. Applies to SECTION_AREA_MM2, VOLUME_MM3 and MASS_G only.

ulp(v)  = 10 ** (floor(log10(|v|)) - 5)      the value of the last digit
                                             the reference actually wrote down
bound   = 8 * ulp(expected)

Concretely, across the oracle's observed magnitudes:

key	magnitude	last place	worst observed	bound
SECTION_AREA_MM2	117 – 474 mm²	0.001	0.003 (3 ULP)	0.008
VOLUME_MM3	11,742 – 47,364 mm³	0.1	0.3 (3 ULP)	0.8
MASS_G	14.6 – 58.7 g	0.0001	0.0005 (5 ULP)	0.0008

The bound scales with magnitude by construction, so it needs no revision if a future case is an order of magnitude larger or smaller.

3. Expectation statements

These are what a passing suite means. Each is asserted by a test.

E-1 — Every accepted case builds. build(family, profile, params) returns a Result for all 113. A raise is a failure, not a rejection.

E-2 — Every rejected case is rejected. All 10 raise ProfileRejected, and the message is non-empty and names the parameter and the limit. Reproducing the geometry while accepting a case the reference refused is not a passing port.

E-3 — Counts are exact. SECTION_PARTS, STRAP_CHANNELS and BUNDLE_COUNT match with zero tolerance.

E-4 — Everything that positions material is exact to regime A. ENVELOPE_X_MM, ENVELOPE_Y_MM, MIN_WALL_ACTUAL_MM and every profile extra (AF_*, FIN_*, SPOKE_*, RING_*, T_*) agree within 1e-4 mm.

Measured: exact in all 123 cases, no exceptions. This is the strongest claim the project makes and regime B must never be extended to cover any of it. If a future change makes one of these keys need a looser bound, the change is wrong.

E-5 — The three discretisation-limited keys agree to regime B. SECTION_AREA_MM2, VOLUME_MM3 and MASS_G agree within 8 ULP of the oracle's six-significant-figure record.

These three are one underlying quantity reported three times: volume is area × 100 mm, mass is volume × 1.24 g/cm³ ÷ 1000. Verified across all 113 accepted cases — VOLUME/AREA is exactly 100.0 with a maximum deviation of 2.8e-14, and MASS/VOLUME is uniform to 1e-8. One bound therefore governs all three honestly, rather than three unrelated policies.

E-6 — The tolerance policy is not vacuous. For every compared value, the bound in force is at most 1e-4 relative. This is asserted directly, so a future edit that loosens the comparison until it stops catching regressions fails a test rather than passing silently.

E-7 — The oracle is unmodified. Its recorded hash covers the whole document except the hash field. Editing the fixture to make a test pass breaks this by design.

E-8 — The 2D path imports no CAD kernel. Building a cross-section must not pull in cadquery, OCP or build123d.

E-9 — The suite is green. There are no expected failures. A red make test means something is wrong.

4. Why the accuracy criterion does not source these numbers

The project's stated accuracy criterion is 0.01 mm over the entire set (PRECISION.md). The obvious move — bound the area error by perimeter × 0.01 mm — was measured on 20260822 and rejected.

Re-expressing every measured area discrepancy as the uniform boundary displacement that would produce it gives |dA| / P, which is directly comparable to the criterion:

median    0.000e+00 mm
p95       9.075e-06 mm
max       1.434e-05 mm     one seven-hundredth of the criterion

A perimeter × 0.01 bound would be 1.86 mm² at the smallest section and 4.54 mm² at the largest — between 1,800 and 4,500 times the worst real discrepancy. It would catch nothing.

Perimeter is also the wrong normaliser. It anti-correlates with the error: the largest discrepancy, 0.003 mm², occurs at P = 209.26 mm, and the smallest, 0.001 mm², at P = 454.41 mm. The error is driven by how many corners tip from 12 arc segments to 13 (F-034), which is a property of the arrangement, not of boundary length. Dividing by perimeter widens the spread from a factor of 3 to a factor of 6.5.

The real quantiser is the reference's own six-significant-figure echo. Every discrepancy in the set is 0.001, 0.002 or 0.003 mm² — one, two or three units in the last digit the reference ever recorded. Regime B is a bound on the mechanism that actually produces the disagreement.

Physically, both boundaries sit within 0.0027 mm (4x) and 0.0043 mm (3x) of a true arc and within ~0.4 µm of each other. Two orders inside the criterion. The geometry was never in question; only the comparison was.

5. What would invalidate this

• Any case exceeding 3 ULP. The mechanism would have changed and the bound would no longer describe it. Investigate before widening.
• A case where VOLUME/AREA is not the model length, or where MASS/VOLUME is not the density ÷ 1000. E-5's single-bound justification rests on that propagation.
• Regime B extended to any key in E-4. See E-4.
• A surviving mutation. The bound must be demonstrated to catch a deliberately introduced regression. A comparison that no longer notices is worse than the 30 known failures were, because it is silent.

6. What this document does not say

It says nothing about whether a member is structurally adequate, and nothing about manufacturing tolerance. Passing acceptance means this implementation reproduces the reference, not this part is fit for use. PRECISION.md §7 holds the list of what the compiler does not do, and it governs.

7. Correction to HANDOFF.md §7

The per-profile breakdown recorded there — Three-Fin 9, Y 7, A Frame 5, Rectangle 5, T 1, Four-Fin 1 — sums to 28 against a stated total of 30. Measured, the distribution is Three-Fin 10, Y 7, A Frame 6, Rectangle 5, T 1, Four-Fin 1 = 30. Three-Fin and A Frame were each undercounted by one.

Applied 2026-09-13. HANDOFF.md §7 now carries the measured figures. The correction sat here, and in F-034's resolution, for three weeks while the wrong numbers stayed in the document a successor reads first — which is the argument against leaving a correction notice parked in a second document. It is kept as history rather than deleted, because F-034's resolution cites it.