Operational Transition Test (OTT): Experimental Crucible v0.3 - Frozen Reduced-VCX Prospective Protocol

This record contains the frozen prospective protocol for version 0.3.0 of the Operational Transition Test (OTT) Experimental Crucible. Context. The v0.2 frozen protocol (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22116064) was publicly timestamped before execution; its prospective run was then published unmodified (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22116481) and the primary frozen hypothesis H1 failed: the context_fragile_macro negative family reached FPR = 0.3750 against the frozen per-family limit of 0.10. v0.3 is the prospective reduction response to that specific falsifier; the v0.2 result record remains unchanged. What v0.3 changes. The six-criterion v0.2 battery (F, K, E, D, R, G) is reduced to a three-criterion V–C–X core: V — scope-wide interventional validity; C — robust control-cost compression; X — attributable constrained operational expansion. The reduction decisions are documented inside the archive (protocol/core_definition.json, docs/ALGEBRAIC_AUDIT_v0.2.md). Freeze statement. All v0.3 thresholds, benchmark families, seed derivation rules, development/evaluation allocation, resource accounting, baselines, ablations, and scoring rules are frozen before prospective execution. NO v0.3 prospective development/evaluation run has occurred. The archive contains run-lock machinery (template only); no RUN_AUTHORIZATION.json exists in this deposit. Non-claims. VCX is not a new theory of causal abstraction; threshold values are benchmark decision thresholds, not universal constants; passing the prospective benchmark would establish discriminative utility in the benchmark, not a universal law of emergence. Integrity (SHA-256). ZIP archive: 28a7d5cef7e3b2791781b0acec0fa495e9a02caeeb9f213b1b12153467bb9c36; manuscript PDF: 45119ef10bb48547059cd8a54e439a15dc78ef12147069e1c53454f10ca7cd3c; canonical protocol root: 44cc90e34397b83a4bce29ab9307511dcdf78e5a22b97bc39f03ecd4bfa29b06 (all 32 protocol-manifest files independently verified before publication; uploaded files confirmed byte-identical). Licensing. Record license CC BY 4.0 (scientific text, protocol, documentation, benchmark data). Source code (src/, tests) remains under Apache License 2.0 per LICENSES.md inside the archive.