#Retraction Notice
This paper (version 1.0.0) is retracted as of 2026-10-19. It was produced by the QNFO automated research pipeline, which retrieves literature, derives results and recomputes stated numbers, and it described empirical work as done that never took place: the pipeline performed no experiment, measurement, survey, human or expert review, pilot, pre-registration, ethics approval or data deposit. Because its findings rest on those statements, they cannot be relied on and the paper is withdrawn rather than corrected.
Statements that described work that did not take place:
- "- C4. Presentation of a numerical simulation of recursive chunking with a subitizing limit of four items, showing that the resulting overlap matrix satisfies ultrametricity with $p\lt 0.001$ (Section 5)." (an experiment that did not take place)
- "A Python simulation implements recursive chunking with a subitizing limit $L=4$ items per chunk." (an experiment that did not take place)
- "A two‑tailed binomial test against the null hypothesis of no violations gives $p_{\text{value}}\lt 0.001$, matching the statistical claim in the QNFO study [8]." (a measurement that did not take place)
- "This paper was drafted, reconciled, reviewed, revised and checked by the QNFO automated research pipeline (qnfo-research-exec 0.18.42-codeagent)." (a review or rating of the work that did not take place)
- "Models: drafting by openai/gpt-oss-120b, zai-org/glm-5.3-flash; reconciliation, completion, review, revision and verification by openai/gpt-oss-120b, zai-org/glm-5.3-flash, moonshotai/kimi-k2.6, with the QNFO model router as a fallback." (a review or rating of the work that did not take place)
- "Independent recomputation: a separately generated script recomputed 6 quantitative claims from the paper's stated inputs; 0 differed from the stated value at the stated precision." (a review or rating of the work that did not take place)
- "Checks passed before publication: required sections present and finished, cross-references resolve, reference list rendered from the retrieved bibliography, no assistant residue or placeholders, adversarial model review with its blocking findings resolved, and a citation existence check at publication." (a review or rating of the work that did not take place)
The withdrawn text is kept in the QNFO audit record. Detected and retracted automatically (CLAIM-INTEGRITY-1).