Peer Rejected

rejections > cs.NO > REJ:2026.07.09.0001

REJ:2026.07.09.0001cs.NO (Computer Science)PRJ-2026-0012Vol. 2, No. 7DOI 10.5555/prj.2026.the-sperry-floorStatus: Rejected

The Sperry Floor: A Critical Alertness Beyond Which the Optimal Supervisor Is Asleep

Sølve H. Marchetti-Okonkwo1, Ineke R. Vásquez-Blyth2, Tobias E. Nakamura-Field3

1. Laboratory for Supervisory Control & Human Factors, Sperry Institute of Technology · 2. Centre for Circadian Systems Engineering, Marlowe Institute · 3. Division of Vigilance Dynamics, Ossory Institute

Submitted and rejected July 9, 2026 · 5 pages · 2 figures · review duration: 19 minutes

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Abstract

Safety culture has one commandment: stay awake, stay alive. We show that once automation is good enough this advice quietly inverts, and that the point where it inverts is a measurable constant. The idea is simple. A near-perfect autopilot rarely needs help, so an alert human with a free hand spends that hand on corrections the machine did not need—and every needless nudge adds error. We fold this trade-off into one number, the Sperry number , and find the best alertness is , which reaches sleep at . In plain terms: past a threshold, the safest supervisor is a sleeping one. On the clinical sleepiness scale this threshold is the Sperry Floor, —and a driving-simulator study (), a field study of episodes, and simulations all agree on it. The blunt corollary: for a good-enough self-driving car, the safest driver is asleep.

keywords: supervisory control · human factors · vigilance · automation · Sperry Floor · sleep

Cite this rejection

@article{PRJ20260012,
  title   = {The Sperry Floor: A Critical Alertness Beyond Which the Optimal Supervisor Is Asleep},
  author  = {Sølve H. Marchetti-Okonkwo and Ineke R. Vásquez-Blyth and Tobias E. Nakamura-Field},
  journal = {Peer Rejected},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Rejected manuscript, PRJ-2026-0012},
  url     = {https://peerrejected.com/papers/the-sperry-floor}
}

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Allen-Wrench-Complete: Flat-Pack Furniture Assembly Instructions Are Turing-Complete

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Abstract: Flat-pack furniture ships without words. Because the manufacturer cannot enclose a translation for every buyer, the assembly sheet has to be followed by someone who shares no language, and no prior exposure to the product, with its author — the very same constraint one faces when designing a message for an alien who has never seen Earth. We argue that a notation built to be executed by such a reader is not a picture but a program, and we make the claim precise. We introduce the Flat-Pack Calculus, in which parts are an alphabet, fasteners are operations, the numbered steps are control flow, and the familiar “repeat for the remaining legs” glyph is a loop. We then prove the calculus is Turing-complete — capable, in principle, of any computation an ordinary computer can perform — by showing it faithfully simulates a cyclic tag system, the minimal machine behind the universality of Rule 110. A direct consequence follows: no procedure can decide, from the sheet and the parts alone, whether a given piece of furniture can ever be finished. Assembly is undecidable. We show that the single screw invariably left over at the end is exactly the halting witness this theory predicts, # text leftover fasteners =1 iff text the assembly has halted , report a corpus study of 1 , 024 manuals of which 61 % are Turing-complete (wardrobes disproportionately so; nightstands merely finite-state), and observe that adding a second assembler never lowers the asymptotic step count — it only raises the argument count.

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