L7A vs. Contemporary Back-Propagation Systems

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1. Learning Paradigm

• Back-prop: Minimize a loss surface defined on past data.

– Objective: “make yesterday’s error small.”

– Risk: Learns spurious correlations that vanish tomorrow.

• L7A: Evolve structures whose only fitness criterion is walk-forward survival.

– Objective: “forecast unseen days correctly or die.”

– Result: Structures that generalize by construction, not by hope.

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2. Internal Representation

• Back-prop: Continuous weight matrices updated by gradient steps.

– Black-box; no human-readable semantics.

– Billions of parameters; fragile to distribution shift.

• L7A: Discrete count-based histogram maps.

– Each cell literally records “how many times this pattern led to up vs. down.”

– Fully interpretable; can be rendered as heat-maps and audited.

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3. Over-fitting & Generalization

• Back-prop: Combats over-fitting with tricks (dropout, L2, early-stop).

– Still vulnerable; cross-validation is post-hoc.

• L7A: Over-fitting is structurally impossible; every candidate is born on unseen data.

– Only survivors reproduce. No re-training ever required (5 000+ days, zero resets).

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4. Noise Immunity

• Back-prop: Noise is implicitly memorized unless explicitly regularized away.

– Leads to “hallucination” in adversarial or low-signal data.

• L7A: Noise cannot accumulate; it is diluted by counts across thousands of traces.

– Built-in abstention discards ambiguous regions entirely.

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5. Abstention Logic

• Back-prop: Always outputs a number; confidence is often an after-thought.

– High false-positive risk in noisy regimes.

• L7A: Explicit abstention when evidence is weak.

– Sharply reduces false positives; preserves capital and trust.

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6. Re-training & Regime Dependency

• Back-prop: Needs periodic retraining when markets shift.

– Adds operational risk and data-leakage potential.

• L7A: Static maps evolved once; performance persists across bull, bear, and crisis regimes.

– Demonstrates time-invariance of captured behavioral structure.

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7. Empirical Edge

• Back-prop: Best public Sharpe on daily S&P 500 signals ≈ 0.5–1.0.

– Requires frequent re-tuning; degrades quickly.

• L7A: Walk-forward Sharpe > 3.0 over 3+ years with no retraining.

– Winning points/losing points ratio 72 %; max drawdown < 1 % of index range.

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8. Scalability & Compute

• Back-prop: GPU-hungry, iterative, gradient-based.

• L7A: CPU-friendly, embarrassingly parallel GA; once evolved, maps are static look-ups.

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How Ground-Breaking?

• First system to show decade-scale out-of-sample profitability on a major index without retraining.

• First architecture to replace back-prop with evolutionary generalization pressure as the sole learning force.

• First demonstration that interpretable, count-based memory can outperform opaque deep nets in adversarial time-series forecasting.

In short: L7A does not refine the back-prop paradigm—it bypasses it entirely, offering a new foundation for robust inference in noisy, adversarial domains.