EnableBatchNorm and BatchNormWindow demoted from inputs to constants. Batch
norm is required, not optional: measured on identical MLP_3L topologies it
was worth +11.3 points of balanced accuracy (57.0% with, 45.7% without),
stable across 150+ and 200+ eras, and the no-BN control converged to ~5% IS
and OOS accuracy with no chart signals at all. A user cannot make a good
decision here and can easily make a ruinous one, so the choice is not
offered. BatchNormWindow goes with it - a running-statistics window in
samples has no meaningful setting a trader could reason about, and its only
other reachable state (<=1) silently disables the layer.
Kept as named constants rather than deleted: the topology builder, the
weights fingerprint and the .cfg guard all read them, and a constant keeps
those paths - and the ability to flip one for a diagnostic rebuild - intact.
Fewer knobs also means a shorter Market description and less room for a
buyer to misconfigure.
EXPERIMENTS.md records runs 2 and 3, since the MT5 logs are wiped between
runs and these measurements are what the design decisions rest on. Run 3
(12h, uncapped tau=1.0) is a write-off: zero eras out of 1,993 across the
five batch-norm charts ever called a direction on fewer than half of all
bars, at a median precision equal to the ~6.1% base rate. The damage was
present at era 1 and never recovered over 292-766 eras.
Both builds compile 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
