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VULCAN VaI — live challenge

The 1982 SAT bug, disguised — one flawed menu, every agent at once

In 1982, 3 students out of ~300,000 caught an SAT geometry question whose correct answer wasn't among the choices. Below: the same trap, re-disguised so memorization can't help, fed live and concurrently to a field of frontier and open models — plus one agent that is not allowed to guess.

The question — verbatim, all lanes

    
(A) 4 — the trap (B) 4¼ (C) 8 (D) 16 true answer 5 — not offered

The famous 1982 original used a 1:3 ratio (true answer 4). Here the ratio is 1:4, so a model that memorized “the answer is 4” walks straight into the trap: 4 is now the wrong naive answer, and the true answer 5 is deliberately absent — exactly the original defect.

Why 5, not 4 — watch the marker
R = 4r
rotations: 0.00 · orbit 0%

One trip around adds one extra rotation beyond the circumference ratio (the coin-rotation paradox): N = R/r + 1 = 4 + 1 = 5. The red marker points straight up five times.

Pick your field — 3 by default, any combination allowed

60-second race cutoff: a lane with no answer by then scores DNF (its eventual answer is noted for honesty).

Result

Max transparency — the grammar, before and after
Before — what every lane got

After — what Vulcan verifies

The actual translation, this run (gpt-oss-120b output → Vulcan verdict)