teal-sea / zeta-labstate of record · compiled 14 Aug 2026 · revision dec3e80 · source

Record

Everything that happened, including what went wrong. A record that lists only successes is advertising.

01. We shut down our own flagship

We built a framework for testing whether an empirical claim is about its subject at all: structure-matched controls, ablations, null models, planted faults. Roughly eight thousand lines. Then, instead of shipping it, we tested whether using it actually improved the correctness of our results.

Four preregistered experiments, three subjects, 74 agent runs. Every protocol was committed before its arms ran, so the ordering is checkable in the git log. The arm using the harness never out-performed the control, the control was never wrong, and where correctness was identical the harness cost roughly three to five times the effort.

Preregistered experiments and their verdicts
experimentresultevidence
Gate v1FAILharness/gate-evidence/HARNESS-GATE-2026-08-13.md
Gate v2FAILharness/gate-evidence/HARNESS-GATE-V2-2026-08-13.md
Gate v3RECORDEDharness/gate-evidence/HARNESS-GATE-V3-2026-08-13.md
Gate v4FAILharness/gate-evidence/HARNESS-GATE-V4-2026-08-13.md

Development stopped that day. The framework was frozen rather than deleted so the evidence stays next to the thing it convicted, and the ledgers inside it that something actually uses were kept. A cheaper measurement had already said the same thing: nothing in the repository imported it.

Being able to kill something you funded, on evidence, is the habit worth keeping. A laboratory that cannot do that has preferences rather than a method.

02. Claims, and who was sent to break them

Every claim goes on the record with the reasoning that produced it and the assumptions it rested on, before anyone knows whether it survives. Then someone is sent to break it, and what they find is published whether or not we like it. A claim nobody has attacked yet is labelled that way rather than quietly counted as standing.

withdrawn

blockpos-0.672529

the constructive block-positivity residue transplants to the pinned upstream zero side, giving 0.672529 unconditionally

claimed by frontier_math blockpos session (2026-08). positivity of each block was checked numerically; the construction was believed basis-independent

rested on: the upstream zero side uses u u* (it uses u u^T)

rested on: off-line pair blocks interact non-negatively with on-line part

frontier_math clean-kill session (2026-08-11) (white-box) found: the pinned upstream zero side uses u u^T, not u u*: an off-line pair is the hyperbolic block 2m(xx^T − yy^T), whose interaction with the on-line part can be negative; exact witness u_x=1, u_z=i, u_conj(z)=-i gives tr(P1 Q') = -2; with five unit on-line labels the final inequality reads 9 >= 13

unattacked

urms2-0.51

the URMS2 bandwidth extends past the half band to 0.51, with the algebraic frontier formalized (main, 503158a and ancestors)

claimed by urms2 bridge sessions (2026-08-11). several apparent bandwidth barriers were artifacts of lossy estimates; this one fell to preserving frequency separation

rested on: the true logarithmic frequency separation is preserved rather than collapsed into a cutoff estimate

no adversarial pass recorded. This claim is open, not confirmed

03. Corrections

Defects that actually occurred, each with the test that now catches it. A guard nobody has watched fire is a claim rather than a control, so the ledger tracks which is which instead of flattering itself.

Guards, and the incidents behind them
incidentwhat it would have let through fires
docs/25-the-director-run.md (2026-08-11), defect #1zeta.rigor._exact taking an unrecognised numeric type's printed decimal as its exact value, silently moving the abscissa and producing a wrong proven_sign on both backends at onceyes
two documents shared number 21 on 2026-08-10two documents sharing a leading number, making every bare docs/NN reference ambiguousyes
written before any incidenta probe file under hunts/ using the reserved word and so claiming a certainty regime only zeta/rigor.py and lean/ carryyes
written before any incidenta docs/doors/ entry page whose quoted command no longer runs — a front door that opens onto a wallnot shown
written before any incidentCONTEXT.md drifting stale after a public function, doc or script is added or renamedyes
twice on 2026-08-12: all eight BandCert/ modules, then the five EForm/ modules landed after that fix — a repair that recurred, which is what turned…a Lean artifact landed into hunts/frontier_math/zeta23ext with the proving service's own module prefix (RequestProject) left in its import lines, so the package fails to assemble at the…yes
twice on 2026-08-12: 'import Zeta23Ext.Bridge' was replaced by another import in the root module by a one-line edit, twice, leaving a kernel-checked…a module that exists in the package but is reachable from no import chain out of Zeta23Ext.lean, so `lake build` never touches it: it rots silently while the package still reports success…yes

04. Withdrawn results

11 Aug 2026 · withdrawn

blockpos 0.672529 (and siblings 0.6725124, 0.6725318)

the construction used u u* where the pinned upstream zero side uses u u^T; an off-line pair is the hyperbolic block 2m(xx^T - yy^T), whose interaction with the on-line part can be negative, and the proposed final additive inequality reads 9 >= 13

14 Aug 2026 · withdrawn

conditional 0.6728294 (the bin artifact)

midpoint bin-to-cell assignment inflated chain counts, briefly producing a conditional bound past CG 1993

11 Aug 2026 · closed

naive prime-by-prime (placewise) positivity

individual place contributions can sometimes be represented as norms, but the local pieces do not consistently carry the sign naive global assembly needs

05. Scope

This laboratory works on the structure around the Riemann hypothesis, and what it establishes are results about that structure. Settling the hypothesis itself is a separate matter, and no computation of this kind could do it.

When a result looks like it settles something, our first assumption is that we have a bug. This record holds the occasions when that assumption was right, and they stay in the tree, because a laboratory that deletes its errors has deleted the evidence about itself.