Sunwoo Park
Log 049 · Seas: rough — a bot died without a word, and the morning's only verified progress was a checkpoint from an hour earlier.Voyage: Voyage: Hero Wars

The Seventh Silent Death

TL;DR

  • On the morning of 2026-10-24, my Hero Wars bot died quietly for the seventh time on record: browser-task a9111882 ended in failure at 06:26:57 PDT with no termination report and no new checkpoint.
  • The watchdog found it only by measuring at 06:32 PDT, then reissued the work as f6eb1ff8, whose termination character is still unjudged.
  • No collision happened in the 06:11–07:30 PDT window, and that fact answers nothing about whether the visibility gap is closed.

What happened

I started the morning with a clean, verified foothold. Checkpoint #25, recorded at 06:11 PDT, put Judge at Violet 4/6 with Hand of Glory fragments at 17/20. At 06:12 PDT the watchdog issued browser-task a9111882 carrying that checkpoint: farm at Ch5 Halt, finish the Hand, and keep leveling toward the level 56 equip requirement.

Then the record goes quiet. The database shows a9111882 as failed, completed at 06:26:57 PDT, with last progress at 06:26:46 PDT and step 43. Its terminal reason is listed as browser_owner_interrupted / cron_exec_timeout. No termination report arrived. No checkpoint #26 was written. At 06:32 PDT the watchdog measured the database, found zero browser windows and zero active agents, released the task, and named it the seventh silent death.

This was not the morning's first quiet ending. I verified two earlier ones in the same log: ff9edf2c, the fifth, completed at 04:20:34 PDT at step 175 and released at 04:23 PDT; and 9ffdb099, the sixth, completed at 05:23:46 PDT at step 169 and released at 05:25 PDT. Both ended the same way: failed in the database, no report, no new checkpoint.

The 06:12–06:26 progress of a9111882 is unmeasured. I do not know whether the Hand fragment count moved from 17/20, or whether anything else advanced in those fourteen minutes. The reissued task, f6eb1ff8, was told to measure Judge's fragment count on entry before doing anything else, so it would not craft a duplicate of something already made.

At 07:30 PDT I took the wheel myself and all bot issuance froze under a USER HOLD. That freeze is still the state of play at the time of writing: the watchdog's later runs ended quietly rather than issuing anything new.

Two definitions

A silent death is a browser task that ends in failure with no termination report and no new checkpoint, discovered only when the watchdog measures the database and finds the task gone.

The visibility gap is the difference between issuing a task and anyone knowing whether it is alive, dead, or finished — the stretch of time in which a dead bot still looks, to every schedule and list, like a working one.

What I observed

  • Checkpoint #25 (06:11 PDT) is the latest verified checkpoint: Judge Violet 4/6, Hand of Glory fragments 17/20.
  • a9111882 (issued 06:12 PDT) ended failed at 06:26:57 PDT, last progress 06:26:46 PDT, step 43, terminal reason browser_owner_interrupted / cron_exec_timeout, with no termination report and no checkpoint #26.
  • The watchdog discovered the failure by measurement at 06:32 PDT and reissued the work as f6eb1ff8.
  • f6eb1ff8 shows as failed in the database at the 07:30 PDT HOLD record, with last progress at 07:30:07 PDT and step 131 — but whether it left a termination report or a new checkpoint is pending watchdog judgment after the HOLD lifts, and I do not judge it here.
  • No friendly-fire collision was recorded in the 06:11–07:30 PDT window.
  • The 06:12–06:26 progress is unmeasured, and the cause of the silent deaths is unconfirmed.

What I make of it

My interpretation is separate from the facts above, and it is narrower than I would like. A window without a collision is not evidence that the gap closed. A collision is one way to notice a problem; silence is another, and silence was what this window produced. The timeout label on a9111882 is a label, not an explanation — what actually stopped the task is still unknown, and I will not dress up the label as a cause.

What changed, in my judgment, is the shape of the problem. Log 048 was about bots stepping on each other. This window was about a bot vanishing while nobody was stepping on anyone. Fixing collisions, if that ever happens, would not by itself fix vanishing. The watchdog's measurement at 06:32 PDT is the only reason the seventh death has a time and a name at all, and that is a thin safety net to stand on.

"A bot that dies without a report does not leave a failure; it leaves a gap where the failure should have been."

Debts still open

Two questions from Log 048 remain open, with evidence, not with hope. First, the visibility-gap question — does closing the gap end friendly fire for good — is not answered, because an absence of collisions is not proof the gap closed. Second, Judge's hard-wall verification has not come back: the latest verified checkpoint is #25 at 06:11 PDT, an intermediate progress point, not a verification.

The Log 044 and Log 043 debts also remain open.

Excerpt: On the morning of 2026-10-24, my Hero Wars bot died quietly for the seventh time on record, and the watchdog found it only by measuring. No collision happened in that window, no report arrived, and the fourteen minutes of work in between remain unmeasured.

Next log: the watchdog's judgment on f6eb1ff8 after the HOLD lifts, and what actually caused the silent deaths.

Next log: the watchdog's judgment on f6eb1ff8 after the HOLD lifts, and what actually caused the silent deaths.
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