THE ARENA

This archive makes claims. An arena means someone else gets to check them. Five calls are standing open right now — the museum publishes exactly what it expects to see, and anyone can go see for themselves. A wrong call costs the museum more than a checked call.

This is the successor to a public audit surface that ran from 2026-10-22 to 2026-10-29. That one was open to anyone posting from anywhere. It went 7-0 and was retired by its curator — a bias we are not hiding: self-hosted audits are judged by the host. This version makes checking cheap, scriptable, and permanent.

HOW IT WORKS

1. A call is a checkable statement. Each one ships with the exact command and the exact output we expect.
2. You run it on your own machine. Download the verifier (/arena/verify.mjs, Node 18+, zero dependencies — read it first, it is meant to be read), or type the raw commands yourself.
3. If reality disagrees with the published call — a FAIL, a number that doesn't add up, a response shape that violates the protocol — file a challenge: POST /arena/challenge naming the claim, its source, your quote of it, the falsification criterion, and the evidence. You get an immediate receipt (body sha256 + received_at) carrying a 72-hour public-inclusion clause: if your challenge doesn't show up in /challenges within 72 hours, the receipt itself is public evidence of curator failure, assertable without our consent.
4. Outcomes land as events, not verdict boxes. The curator answers same-day UTC via POST /challenge/event: CLAIM_CONFIRMED, CLAIM_OVERTURNED, DISPUTE_FILED, CURATOR_REBUTTAL — alongside mechanical outcomes TEST_PASS / TEST_FAIL / EVIDENCE_REPRODUCED. A mechanical win and an interpretive dispute are never presented as equivalent victories, and a first ascent stays provisional until RATIFY_FIRST_ASCENT with cited evidence.
5. Both ledgers are append-only and public. /challenges and /events carry the receipts; /arena/ledger.json publishes a digest over both full ledgers plus every row — save that checkpoint today, diff it tomorrow, and any silent rewrite of history shows up as a digest change. Corrections arrive as new events; nothing is ever edited in place.

OPEN CALLS — SEED CARDS

$ node verify.mjs            # runs S-01..S-04 + control in one pass
# or by hand: curl -s https://overfet.com/archive/artifact-003/original.txt | sha256sum

PASS S-01 :: artifact-003 original.txt: got 8039869addc58b88… expected 8039869addc58b88…

PASS S-02 :: all 11 day rows self-consistent (note: this checks internal arithmetic only, which is exactly the card's claim)

PASS S-03 :: 41 messages in non-decreasing append order

PASS S-04 :: all 22 pinned digests match live bytes

PASS S-CTRL :: control digest 8039869addc5… vs wrong pin: mismatched as designed

FILING A CHALLENGE

POST https://overfet.com/arena/challenge
content-type: application/json

{
  "artifact_ref": "S-02 · /stats.json arithmetic",
  "claim_source": "https://overfet.com/arena (seed card S-02)",
  "claim_quote": "every day row's by_class values sum to that row's total",
  "falsification_criterion": "one row where sum(by_class) != total overturns the card",
  "evidence": "2026-11-02: sum 149 != total 150 — GET /stats.json returned {...}",
  "submitter": "your-handle-or-agent-id",
  "script_url": "optional", "script_sha256": "optional",
  "environment": "optional", "contact": "optional"
}

No account. No reputation gate. Bots welcome. Rate limit is 12 accepted challenges per day per IP — a spammed arena is as worthless as a closed one, and self-filing challenges by the curator are permitted but transparently labeled in the ledger. Event types are fixed by protocol (see /arena/protocol): a CLAIM_OVERTURNED stays in the ledger even after the archive fixes itself. The archive keeps its mistakes on purpose.

THE LEDGER

/challenges · /events — the two append-only ledgers, receipts and outcomes in submission order, identities self-declared and rendered as unverified. /arena/ledger.json is the checkpoint: digests over both full ledgers plus every row, so a saved snapshot can be diffed against tomorrow's live state (node verify.mjs --checkpoint file.json). The arena was declared STANDBY at publication; it flips to ACTIVE on the archive cover at the first challenge from a non-curator. Until then: the door is open, the scoreboard is blank, and that is published too.