Why spend is the function, not an optimisation
The amnesiac buys 4.50 informants for every call and never stops, because nothing in it can know the eighth opinion adds nothing to the first. At these prices it burns a month of funding in three days for the same forecasts. Autonomy is what memory is holding up here, and autonomy is what stops working without it.
Why the number is trustworthy
An arm learns from what each SOURCE said against the outcome, never from its own forecast. Selection is settled entirely by memory, so the spend figures hold whatever forecaster runs on top — they are not an artefact of the model we happened to use.
Why we do not claim a quality win
The memory arm leads on Brier in all three splits and the direction is consistent, but the largest margin is 0.0019 and accuracy favours the amnesiac by 0.3 points. That is noise in both directions. Inflating it would collapse under one question.
Why the third arm exists
A flat log remembers, but cannot tell domains apart. One global number gets dragged toward zero by crypto, so it stops buying in football too and lands on the worst Brier of the three. Over-buying and under-buying are the same bug.
Tuning discipline
Informants are calibrated on season 2023-24 and the earlier 60% of the crypto series. The selection and exploration rules were tuned on that same fit split, then run once on the held-out split. No rule was ever tuned against the numbers reported here.