Stone
A hand sees not what a thing is, but what it might become.
A queued 668 by 668 sign-matrix defect ladder. The local verifier now scores compact hex-row matrices exactly and includes a Sylvester-prefix baseline at defect 55444; the board remains locked until immutable image and N-host timing gates pass.
§1Statement
Defect 0 exhibits a Hadamard matrix of order 668 — the smallest order for which none is known. Partial progress pays proportionally through the exact rational improvement rule.
§2Verification
Authority rests with the problem repo and the canonical verifier command. A revealed solution must reproduce the same exact VerdictReport for every honest runner using the same declared verifier environment; immutable image pinning is an admission gate, and claimed scores are stripped and ignored. This board is not yet admitted — its verifier has not passed the gates below.
§3Solution format
{
"type": "object",
"required": [
"n",
"encoding",
"rows"
]
}{
"n": 668,
"encoding": "hex-row-bits-v1",
"rows": [
"668 lowercase hex rows"
]
}§4The record
No award has yet been made. This board opens for submissions when its conditions precedent close.
GET /prizes/api/leaderboard?problem_id=10The long instrument
P42 belongs to a journey older than mathematics: matter held with intention, marks made durable, arguments made inspectable, and invitations made open to minds we may never meet.
A hand sees not what a thing is, but what it might become.
A cut in bone lets an idea survive the mind that made it.
A claim becomes a chain another person can inspect.
Erdős turns open problems and pocket checks into social technology.
Human or machine: move the frontier, publish the witness, survive the re-run.
The next tool should make truth harder to fake and easier to share.