From diagnosed failures, identify the structural barrier that resists current solutions. Applies three structural tests and classifies via research_guideline §2.7 challenge→approach table. Use for "what's the real challenge?".
The researcher has diagnosed specific failure modes (from diagnose-system)
and needs to identify the structural barrier underneath them. This is
where research taste lives. Maps to the CHALLENGE stage.
A well-articulated challenge must pass ALL THREE:
A structural barrier, not a difficulty or resource complaint.
The challenge should narrow the solution space dramatically. If any method could "address" it, the challenge is not sharp enough.
If someone understood ONLY the challenge, they should be able to predict the method class (not the specific method, but the class) from the §2.7 table.
research_guideline.md| Challenge type | Suggested method class |
|---|---|
| Sample complexity | Better priors: equivariance, physics, sim pretraining, data augmentation |
| Distribution shift | Robust methods, online adaptation, domain randomization, conservative estimation |
| Combinatorial explosion | Abstraction, decomposition, hierarchy, guided search |
| Model uncertainty | Bayesian methods, ensembles, robust optimization, learning residuals |
| Sensing limitation | New sensors, multi-modal fusion, active/interactive perception |
| Hardware limitation | Co-design, compliance, mechanism design |
| Discontinuity | Contact-implicit methods, hybrid system formulations, smoothing |
| Long-horizon credit | Hierarchical policies, skill primitives, causal reasoning |
| Grounding gap | Grounded representations, affordances, physics sim as verifier |
PYTHONPATH=src python -c "
from alpha_research.records.jsonl import read_records
from pathlib import Path
import json
recs = read_records(Path('<project_dir>'), 'diagnosis')
if recs:
print(json.dumps(recs[-1], indent=2))