Depth Beats Count — hypothesis
Supplied working report; original verdicts not validated.
Review status: Needs review. This is an archival source note, not a passed proof.
hypothesis.md
# Depth Beats Count — hypothesis **Source:** Incoprea Theory Volume IX, Theory 37 / Society, Computation & Engineering. **Claim (verbatim):** "System availability is set by the depth of the dependency chain rather than by the number of services, so a shallow system with many services can be more reliable than a deep one with few." **Predictions (verbatim):** - P1 — Downtime should track dependency depth. - P2 — Shallow many-service systems should outperform deep few-service ones. - P3 — Reducing depth should improve availability. **Refutation (verbatim):** Downtime tracking service count at controlled depth would favour count models. **Pre-registered test.** Model each service as a hop that fails independently with a small probability, so a request through a serial chain succeeds only if every hop succeeds. Compare a deep serial chain against a shallow, parallelised system built from the same or more services. Verify the closed form by Monte Carlo, and hold per-hop reliability fixed while depth and fan-out vary. **Fixed before running:** per-hop availability 0.999; serial chains for depth; parallel (any-one-chain-succeeds) for breadth.