C.18:1 - Problem Frame

Open-ended search and quality-diversity work deliberately keep more than one candidate alive. That is useful for engineering, science, design, music, dance, AI-agent frameworks, medical method families, and other evolving practices. The same archive or front label can hide strong candidates, weak but promising stepping stones, coverage-expanding variants, architecture candidates, cultural variants, and telemetry-only signals.

The primary EntityOfConcern in C.18 is the archive or front relation being stewarded: which variants are generated or retained, under which descriptor and characteristic space, with which edition and lineage pins, and with which next relation available. C.18 does not answer a local-choice, selector-result declaration, cultural-evolution, or architecture question.