McPhetridge, Mitchell D.: DRE: Dynamic Recursive Entropy vs. Recursive Drift Exploitation A Constraint-First Distinction

Modern reasoning systems — especially Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) — rely on recursive continuation to perform reflective inference, counterfactual evaluation, and iterative refinement. Under admissible conditions, recursion performs eliminative work: candidate representations are tested under constraint, uncertainty contracts, and viable solution space narrows toward convergence. Within the McPhetridge constraint-first architecture, recursion is admissible only when it produces eliminative eff