Verification: how solid is it?
We order these strongest to weakest. When we're unsure, the lower grade wins.
A machine-checked proof (Lean, Coq, Isabelle) or an exact symbolic or computational verification that anyone can rerun. The gold standard.
Multiple qualified people unaffiliated with the announcing lab have checked the result and confirmed it.
Published in a venue with real review. Weaker than a formal proof for mathematics, but stronger for empirical claims.
The human collaborator checked it, but no independent party has confirmed it yet.
Announced but not yet checked by anyone outside the lab. The default for a press release.
Substantive technical objections have been raised and remain unresolved.
The result turned out to already exist in the literature. These entries stay on the record; showing the failure mode is what makes the rest trustworthy.
Shown to be wrong.
Autonomy: how much did the AI do?
This axis is the whole point. Most breathless claims collapse here; we grade on the strictest defensible reading.
The AI produced the core idea and the result with no human mathematical input beyond posing the problem.
The AI produced the key insight; humans formalised, checked, or cleaned it up.
Genuine back-and-forth. Neither party would have gotten there alone.
A human drove the research; the AI accelerated search, algebra, or literature review.
The AI is a component inside a human-designed search loop (FunSearch, AlphaEvolve). The system found it, but the framing was human.
The AI surfaced an existing result humans had overlooked. Valuable, but not new mathematics.
The two are independent. A result can be formally verified and barely autonomous, or autonomous and merely claimed. Reading one grade without the other is how a press release becomes a discovery.
What each source is
Every link on an entry is one of five things, sorted by what the link does rather than who published it. Keeping them apart is the point: most of the distance between a result and a headline is in the last four. A lone researcher announcing their own result is an announcement exactly as a corporate press release is.
The work itself: a paper, preprint, formal proof, dataset or code repository - something a reader can open and check. Not what was said about the work, but the work. Any grade stronger than Claimed has to rest on one of these.
The claim as first made public by the people behind it - a company press release, a research blog post, or an individual's own post on a personal site or social media. What matters is that it is first-party, not that an organisation published it: a single researcher announcing their own result belongs here. This is the claim framed by the people with the most at stake in it.
News and press reporting written by journalists rather than by the people who did the work. Coverage restates a result for a general audience, and the restatement is often where it acquires a stronger meaning than its authors gave it.
The case against: a critical review, a rebuttal, a failed replication, or a citation of prior work showing the result was already known. The strongest challenge is listed first. A challenge disputes the claim, not the people who made it.
Editorial rules
These are what separate the registry from a press-release aggregator.
- We run a novelty check before publishing, no exceptions. What was searched gets recorded even when it comes back clean.
- We never delete an entry. We downgrade and annotate it instead; the public history is the credibility mechanism, and quiet edits destroy it.
- We cap a claim with no reproducible artifact at
claimed. No exceptions for famous labs. - We start lab-announced results at
claimedregardless of how confident the announcement sounds. - We grade autonomy on the strictest defensible reading. If a human posed the problem, suggested the approach, and checked the algebra, that is not autonomous.
Other registries
Where another project holds a record of the same result, entries cite it and say what it establishes. None of these grades autonomy, and none keeps refuted results.
An independent write-up by someone who neither produced the result nor is reporting it as news - a researcher's blog post, an expert explainer, a detailed thread. Often the most informative link on an entry. It may support the claim, complicate it, or both; commentary arguing the result is wrong is a challenge instead.