Side Quests Active

Problems I picked up because they had been nagging at me, worked on properly, and wrote down honestly — including the parts that went nowhere.

Side Quests is where the work that isn't the main work goes.

Crucible is a programme: a pipeline, a corpus, a disclosure process, and a reason to get up in the morning. This is the opposite of that. These are problems I ran into years ago, found interesting, and could not do anything about at the time — either because I lacked the tools, the compute, or the few uninterrupted days it takes to get anywhere. The tools got better. Some of those problems are still interesting.

What belongs here

Anything I chose to spend time on for its own sake. There is deliberately no theme. A number-theory curiosity and a question about how some piece of software behaves have nothing in common except that I wanted to know the answer, and that is enough to put them in the same place.

What they do have in common is the standard they are held to. A side quest is not an excuse for looser work — if anything the opposite, because nobody asked for it and there is no venue to catch my mistakes. So the same rules apply as everywhere else on this site: claims are the size of the evidence, numbers are checkable, and the things I got wrong are in the write-up rather than quietly left out.

What that means in practice

Most of these are not going to produce a result. That is the normal outcome of picking up a hard problem for three days, and it is worth saying plainly up front rather than implying otherwise by only publishing the ones that worked.

So a post here will usually tell you what I built, what it measured, and where it stopped. Some of them will end with a question I could not answer. Those are the honest ones, and they are the reason this section exists separately from Crucible — a disclosure programme reports findings, and this reports attempts.

⚠ One standing caution, because it applies to more than one of these: a few of these problems sit in areas with a long history of confident amateur claims. Where that is true I will say so in the post, say where my work sits relative to what is already known, and be explicit about what it does not show. If a piece of work here looks like it is claiming more than that, assume I have overstated it and tell me.