PIE·INDUSTRIAL
Case study D · self-improvement, not a baseline beat

Nine campaigns. The search got better each time.

solver run · check these numbers against their artifacts

A different declared contract than case study A: an engine-support bracket, not the 200 kg payload bracket. Over nine real-solver- certified campaigns run between 2026-08-05 and 2026-08-09, PIE's own best safety-passing design for this contract went from 5.49 kg to 4.54 kg to 2.40 kg — every one of those numbers CalculiX/Gmsh certified, not proxy.

Read this before the numbers below: there is no baseline beat here. The declared naive design for this contract — a conventional plate-and-gusset support — is itself CERTIFIED FAILING at 0.953 kg, safety factor 0.748 against a required 1.5. There is no passing baseline to beat on mass. What follows is evidence that PIE's search is improving release over release at finding lighter designs that still pass — measured against itself, not against a working reference design.

The trajectory, every point real-solver certified

The four certified designs that mark the search trajectory. Each row gives the design's description, its candidate identifier, its mass, its governing safety factor with the pass or fail verdict, and the evidence tier it was certified at.
CandidateMassGoverning SFCertified
Declared naive baseline plate-and-gusset 0.953 kg 0.748 — fails validated_sidecar
v9's own first certified pass (12h run, gen 24) bracket_g00000 5.485 kg 1.833 — passes validated_sidecar
Prior campaign's certified winner (v8, 8h run) bracket_g00062 4.539 kg 1.730 — passes validated_sidecar
v9's final winner (12h run, gen 203) bracket_g00087 2.397 kg 1.759 — passes validated_sidecar

Every row: CalculiX static + eigenfrequency on a Gmsh tetrahedral mesh, same declared load cases, same AlSi10Mg material-library entry. 47.2% lighter than the prior campaign's winner (v8 → v9); 56.3% lighter than this same run's own first certified pass (gen 24 → gen 203) — and still 2.52× heavier than the baseline above, because that baseline fails and cannot be beaten, only avoided.

The winner's receipt

v9 winner's certification record winner.json ✓ PASS
{
  "candidate_id": "bracket_g00087_ae6c49af05444",
  "evidence_tier": "validated_sidecar_calculix_gmsh",
  "material": "AlSi10Mg",
  "governing_case": "engine_torque_216Nm_declared_1.5x",
  "governing_safety_factor": 1.7592,
  "mass_kg": 2.3971,
  "first_mode_margin_ratio": 0.5767,
  "mesh": "gmsh · 50,752 nodes / 227,765 tets",
  "passes": true, "failures": []
}
source: engine-support campaign v9 · winner.json · sha256 11b97eb8…

No render yet — like case study A's winner, this candidate's STL wasn't retained after certification, only its solver outputs. A render will appear here when the geometry export is regenerated.

What this is, and isn't

This campaign has not yet been through the audit process that promotes a result into the discovery ledger — it exists today as raw, real-solver-certified campaign artifacts, not yet a ledgered discovery record. We're publishing it anyway, at this stage, because the honesty apparatus applies the same way to an in-progress trend as to a finished claim: every number above traces to a hashed CalculiX artifact, and the caveat that matters — no baseline was beaten — is stated first, not buried.

Back to evidence Bring us a contract like this one