supermix-v87

Supermix v87

A 15.3M-parameter research model that solves physics, chemistry, arithmetic and now Python code-tracing problems by writing out its working. Every training row was checked before it was trained on: science by an exact symbolic solver, code by executing the snippet.

Trace this Python and give x. x = 5
for i in range(4): x = x + 7
  → the loop runs 4 times, x starts at 5, 5 + 7 = 12, 12 + 7 = 19,
    19 + 7 = 26, 26 + 7 = 33, x is 33, total 33
  → CORRECT (33.0)

It is not a chat model, and the limitations section says plainly what it cannot do.

Read this before comparing it with v86

On the tasks v86 could do, this model is not better. Scored paired against Kai9987kai/supermix-v86 on the same problems, same seed 65, same 96-token cap:

v87 wins 34 problems, v86 wins 37. McNemar exact two-sided p = 0.81 — the difference is noise.

What v87 adds is a capability v86 did not have at all:

On its own 30-task benchmark v87 scores 0.806 [0.774, 0.835] over 630 problems, 0 unparseable and 0 truncated. That number is not comparable with v86's 0.779, because nine of its thirty tasks are ones v86 was never trained on. The paired table above is the honest comparison.

Where the points moved

The overall null hides two large effects in opposite directions.

Per-task rows are n = 21, where the 95% Wilson interval is ±20 points at its widest. Treat a per-task change smaller than that as noise.

Eleven untouched control tasks held at 0.9825 against v86's 1.000 (p = 0.125), so the larger corpus diluted nothing.

The finding this model exists to demonstrate

A decomposition only helps if its steps can be derived forward

power fell from 0.333 to 0.048 because of a change made deliberately, with a measurement behind it, that turned out to be a design error.

The measurement was real. Holding task, format, wording and model fixed and moving only the shape of the answer, accuracy on a single written step falls with the number of significant places it must determine:

Sevenfold at constant digit width (results/significant_digits_sweep.json). So power's one-shot 19152 / 76 = 252 was split by place value.

That split is unlearnable, because the partial dividends are back-computed from the answer:

model:  6400 / 64 = 100,  420 / 64 = 5,  122 / 64 = 2
truth:  6400 / 64 = 100, 1920 / 64 = 30, 192 / 64 = 3

To write 1920 the model must already know the next quotient digit is 30. The format is a valid presentation of a result, not a procedure that can be executed forward, so the model invents dividends and divides them wrongly.

decompose_product — which has worked since v74 — splits an input, whose digits are on the page. This split the output.

percent regressed for a related reason: making the final sum explicit did not make it doable. The model now writes both parts correctly and fails the addition it was forced to state (2.4 + 1.2 = 3.2).

So: a step added to a scratchpad helps only when it is derivable forward from what is already written and inside the model's arithmetic. The two changes that made steps easier — resolving a double negative in words, writing the average's running sum as equations — produced the two largest gains this line has recorded.

percent's 0.533 was never a difficulty

percent read 0.533 on v86 for eight versions and was treated as a hard task. It was two tasks averaged:

5, 10, 20, 25 percent  — in the corpus —  16/17 = 0.941
12, 15 percent  — in no corpus row —       0/13 = 0.000

The corpus generator drew from [5, 10, 20, 25, 50]; the benchmark generator drew from [5, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25]. They live in different files, neither imports the other, and the disagreement surfaced as a plausible middling score rather than an error. src/coverage_audit.py now compares every task's two generators; percent was the only hole of thirty.

What did not work

• power, molarity and acceleration are worse than v86. Documented above. The corpus change should be reverted.
• percent is worse than v86 despite the coverage hole being fixed.
• average is still the weakest maths task at 0.286, though up from 0.048. Its additions are written now, but they are still three-place additions (238 + 58 = 296) and there is no token budget left to split those too.
• two_step at 0.429 remains below its v80 level of 0.633.

Training

A note on the step budget, because it was set wrongly and the error is instructive. Steps went from v86's 18,000 to 21,500 to offset the corpus growing 18% in rows. Training consumes tokens, and the same changes made rows longer (power went from a 39-token median response to 69), so total tokens grew 1.369× against a 1.194× step increase — leaving per-token exposure at 0.872 of v86's. The control tasks held anyway, so it did not bind, but that was luck.

Using it

python example_usage.py "Trace this Python and give x. x = 5
for i in range(4): x = x + 7"

src/answer_check.py re-derives the result from the question for 24 question shapes, including code — which it checks by running the snippet — and returns None when it cannot. None means not checked, never correct.

src/step_audit.py is new: it reads a reply as text and checks every operation it can pin down against exact arithmetic, separating a false written step from an operation the format performs without writing. That is what located every failure above.

src/prompt_normaliser.py rewrites a naturally-typed question into the corpus format, because these models answer the trained form and not the natural one. The rewrite is always reported so you can see what was actually asked.

Limitations

• Not a chat model. It emits derivations, not conversation. Multi-turn context degrades it: turn-aligned packing means it never saw any.
• Thirty task types and nothing else. Every prompt comes from a handful of fixed phrasings, and accuracy here is not general problem solving.
• The code tasks trace code; they do not write it. Nine fixed snippet shapes with varying literals. There is no string manipulation, because digit tokenisation makes a word like banana a single token and its letters are not visible to the model in any representation.
• Answers are extracted as the last number in a reply, so a reply that reasons correctly and trails into another number scores wrong. Every score is a lower bound.
• power is broken at 0.048 and the cause is known and documented above.
• A correct answer may be recalled rather than computed. The benchmark draws unseen operands from the same space, which is what makes it recitation-proof, but a single answer to a question resembling training proves nothing alone.