Why it is a question
Wu and Silva (LIT-1032, read in full in NOTE-724) recover coalitions, failed ones included, from the 2017 r/place placement log. Two of their results stop short of what the record would like to say. Successful coalitions are shown working under sustained overwriting, but only in ten chosen lifecycles, so it is not known whether lasting artworks typically persist that way or mostly go unattacked. Falmagne et al. (THEORY-214) find that some compositions are safe through neglect. And survival is barely predictable early from size, area, start time and colour entropy, but no interaction feature was tried, so the unpredictability may lie in the feature set and not in the dynamics. Until 2026-10-19 both were THEORY-216’s promote_when. THEORY-216’s body disclaimed them, so they moved here when its title was narrowed to what the study measured.
The first half bears on CLAIM-280’s defeated_if and on CLAIM-273’s
reading of a maintained artwork as a dissipative structure. The second
bears on QUESTION-093’s latent-coalition dynamics, and the recovery
method’s reliance on behaviour alone bears on QUESTION-084.
What would answer it
A measurement on full placement logs, in r/place or a comparable contested canvas, that tracks recovered or recorded coalitions through time. It would answer the first half yes if artworks lasting to the end received sustained overwrites and repairs throughout, measured as a population and not in hand-picked lifecycles, and no if lasting artworks turn out mostly unattacked. It would answer the second half by adding interaction features (who attacks whom, shared members, alliance ties) to the state features. If early outcomes stay near-unpredictable, the unpredictability is in the dynamics. If they become predictable, it was in the feature set. More illustrated lifecycles cannot settle it, and neither can better final-canvas segmentation scores, which validate the recovery method and not the dynamics.