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teal-sea / zeta-labstate of record · compiled 28 Sep 2026 · revision e4945c4 · source

Library · hunts/support_95bb5cb7/MISSION.md

MISSION: Erdős #126, the size-dichotomy arm (support run 95bb5cb7)

486 words · 61 lines · source

This is a hunt. Nothing in hunts/ is a result, and nothing here is evidence for or against RH (docs/08).

A support run launched by a parent session working hunts/r_186989, to answer one bounded question independently and hand the answer back.

The bounded question

Let $S$ be $k$ primes and $A$ a set of distinct positive integers with every off-diagonal sum $a+b$ $S$-smooth; $g(k) = \max|A|$; the target is $\log g(k) = o(k)$.

Seek a clean size dichotomy: either $A$ is spread out enough that a descent/large-gap argument applies, or $A$ lies in a controlled interval where smooth-number counts apply. Optimise uniformly over $S$ and the scale of $A$. Return an explicit bound, or the exact normalisation/height barrier. Audit hunts/r_186989/RESULTS.md on the way.

Scope

May write: this directory and one case-log entry in hunts/README.md. May not write: any other hunt, zeta/, harness/, lean/, meta/, or any root markdown file.

What it measures

probe.py, stdlib only, ~20 s:

  1. re-verification from scratch of every witness in r_186989/RESULTS.md §3;
  2. exhaustive enumeration of primitive admissible 3-, 4- and 5-element sets through their sums (not their elements), across growing cutoffs, to see whether any height bound exists after normalisation;
  3. a rigorous two-sided sandwich (Rankin upper, simplex-volume lower) on $\log\Psi(N,S)/k$ as a function of $\log N/\log\mathrm{rad}(S)$, which is the counting horn's threshold.
id: support_95bb5cb7
question: Does a size dichotomy (large-gap descent vs smooth-number counting in a controlled interval) yield log g(k) = o(k) for Erdos 126, and if not, where exactly does it fail?
frontier: f(n) >> log n classical, unimproved since 1934; equivalently g(k) <= exp(O(k)). No upper bound on g(k) is established anywhere in this tree.
dead_routes:
  - element-bounded clique search: reports one witness per k and licenses false claims about all optimal witnesses (Hunt #91, corrected here)
  - a multiplicative composition law for g: it would refute the conjecture, not prove it (Hunt #91 section 4)
required_oracles:
  - full trial division of every off-diagonal sum, recomputed from scratch, never reusing the search predicate
  - Rankin's inequality for Psi(x,S), valid for every sigma > 0
  - simplex lattice-point volume as an unconditional lower bound on Psi
kill_conditions:
  - the counting horn's threshold turns out to depend on the choice of S or the scale, so no uniform statement exists
  - primitive admissible sets of sub-extremal size turn out to have bounded height, which would revive the descent horn
  - the two horns are found to overlap, which would settle the arm positive
agents_may:
  - write hunts/support_95bb5cb7/ and one case-log entry in hunts/README.md
  - report corrections to sibling hunts without editing them
agents_may_not:
  - write any other hunts/ directory, zeta/, ontology/, harness/, lean/, meta/, or any root markdown file
  - claim any upper bound on g(k), or any bearing on RH
  - use the reserved word belonging to zeta/rigor.py and the Lean arm