“Composite rewards cleverness; pairwise reveals concreteness. Multi-feature accumulation scores high on absolute heuristics but loses head-to-head against single-feature lines with concrete bodily, spatial, or ritualistic anchors. The composite scorer is the feature-presence scan; pairwise is the discriminator scan. When they disagree, pairwise wins — composite is the approximation, pairwise is the operator's taste in execution.”

Surfaced:Build 3331 (One Line pairwise battle calibration — 200-battle ratification). The B3325 substrate (one_line_battles + one_line_elo tables + Haiku judge + Elo K=32 update) ran two 100-battle rounds against the operator-owned 296-anchor corpus. The top Elo winners after 200 battles were moderate-composite (67-78) lines anchored in concrete imagery: "Tea ring where I've been setting down the same cold cup" / "Earned every breath like rent was due" / "My throat knows the weight / Of words I'll never say" / "Throat full of years I couldn't speak" / "Now the vein knows the needle better than it ever knew her prayers." The high-composite Elo losers were abstract-paradox / meta-aware / religious-poetic / smart-aphorism lines: "Every morning I construct me / Every night I come apart" (composite 86, Elo delta -32) / "I've optimized myself out of existence" (composite 77, Elo delta -30) / "Your hands become communion / And I taste salvation whole" (composite 75, Elo delta -46 across 3 battles). The Haiku judge's per-battle rationale named the discriminator each time: "uses concrete self-destruction to anchor abstract loss" / "uses fluorescent hum, engine idle to SHOW emotion not tell it" / "achieves concrete-abstract anchoring via hands as the specific anchor in a named room."