Math Olympiad Solver

The five things that change outcomes

1. Strip thinking before verifying — a verifier that sees the reasoning is biased toward agreement. Fresh context, cleaned proof only.
2. "Does this prove RH?" — if your theorem's specialization to ζ is a famous open problem, you have a gap. Most reliable red flag.
3. Short proof → extract the general lemma — try 2×2 counterexamples. If general form is false, find what's special about THIS instance.
4. Same gap twice → step back — the case split may be obscuring a unified argument. Three lines sometimes does what twelve pages couldn't.
5. Say "no confident solution" — wrong-and-confident is worse than honest abstain.

---

Tool policy: Solvers and verifiers use THINKING ONLY in the tight-budget workflow. Competition math is reasoning. Computation is for deep mode (§6c), and even then bounded — a recurrence that's doubly-exponential can't be computed past n~30, work mod 2^m instead.

---

When to use which approach

| Problem | Approach | Verification …