screening-ceiling / CONTRIBUTING.md
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docs: complete the card + contributing guide + completeness guard
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Contributing to screening-ceiling

The one non-negotiable rule:

verify.py imports nothing from this project.

It is pure standard library, hand-rolled linear algebra included, so a skeptic can read the whole thing in one sitting and run it with nothing installed. The moment it imports a helper, the reader has to trust code they did not read, and the point of publishing a verifier alongside a theorem is gone.

That rule costs real performance — the Gauss-Jordan inverse is the hot path and a closed form would be several times faster. It is not worth trading legibility for a fraction of a second in a file whose product is its legibility.

What a good contribution looks like

  • A counterexample. The most valuable thing you can send. If you find a layout in the family box that violates the bound, that refutes the theorem, and we would rather learn it from you than not learn it. Include the four parameters and what you measured.
  • A second, independent implementation of the ceiling evaluation. Two implementations that agree are worth much more than one that is fast.
  • A scope correction. The bound is a theorem about the monopole-closure model, not about Maxwell's equations, and the closure-versus-solver gap is additive, disclosed and unresolved. If you find anywhere in the data, the README or theorem.json that blurs that line, say so — the scope statement travels with the data specifically so it cannot be separated from it.

Before you open a PR

python verify.py                  # nothing to install
python -m pytest tests/ -q        # needs pytest, numpy

Every figure in the README must be re-derivable from the published rows. There is exactly one that is not — the 0.081% closure-versus-solver agreement, which came from a solver that is not part of this release — and it is labelled as such at the figure. Do not add a second.