Iteration Archive

These scripts were used during the 100-round LLM-driven iteration loop that produced v0.2 of the Periodic Table of ML Systems. They are preserved here for reproducibility and research provenance — they are not part of the active build pipeline.

The current source of truth is periodic-table/table.yml. Both the standalone index.html and the StaffML React data file are regenerated from it via make all (see ../../Makefile).

Shell scripts

iterate.sh — autonomous improvement loop. Each iteration asks Claude to pick one improvement from a priority list (fix misplacement, add missing element, fix broken bond, improve a whyHere, etc.) and edit index.html.
debate.sh / debate-continue.sh / run_100_rounds.sh — panel-debate scripts that ask Gemini to simulate a 5-expert debate (Patterson, Lattner, Dean, Shannon, Mendeleev) about the table's structure. Output lands in debate-log.md.

Python helpers

append_log.py, update_log.py — append entries to iteration-log.md.
get_elements.py — extract the const elements = [...] array from index.html for inspection.
patch_informal.py, patch_website.py — one-shot find-and-replace scripts to apply a batch of changes to index.html.
run_claude_loop.py — subprocess-driven iteration loop that writes to refinement-log.md.
run_iterations.py, run_iterations_13.py, run_iterations_16_20.py — one-shot scripts that hardcode a 69-element snapshot of the table and perform a full re.sub replacement. These are stale (the current table has 90 elements) and are preserved only as a historical reference.

Important caveats

The hardcoded paths in these scripts are relative to the repo root, not to this archive directory. If you want to re-run any of them, run from the repo root:

python3 periodic-table/scripts/archive/get_elements.py

Or copy the script back to where it originally lived and run from there. The scripts are verbatim historical artifacts — they have not been modified to work from their archived location.