Verification-Limited Intelligence Acceleration: Observable-Only Laws, Bounded Derivation, and Diagnostics under No-Meta Constraints

This paper formalizes a “verification-limited” scaling regime in which candidate proposals proliferate faster than they can be certified under observable-only evidence, in settings with no privileged judge (“no-meta”). The core goal is to define progress, charging, and diagnostics that remain audit-ready and non-gameable even under adversarial missingness, split views, and underspecified rules. The manuscript is explicitly layered: (1) Theory / principle layer (normative semantics). We define an observable-only decision discipline, close-pinned cutoff semantics (a head commitment plus an explicit leaf-index bound), and a strict-only progress credit rule. A central result is an observable-only law of no…