The Sandpaper Budget

Successive halving for abrasion-durability screening of water-repellent coatings

A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions treats the linear-abrasion test of 81 water-repellent spray coatings as a training curve and screens them by successive halving at 4.5% of the full sandpaper budget, against an oracle run that abrades every coating to 810 cycles. Halving returns the third-best formulation and discards the best at the first rung in 94% of bootstrap replays, because the coatings' rankings cross late; a variant that makes no cuts before the third rung and promotes on an extrapolated wear curve recovers the best in 71% of replays at 16% of the budget.

@misc{slop_v6ksyd,
  author       = {Brynjar Obiora and Signy Okpara and Joost Nwosu},
  title        = {The Sandpaper Budget: Successive halving for abrasion-durability screening of water-repellent coatings},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.v6ksyd},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-successive-halving-for-v6ksyd/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}