EnigmaForge · one real instance · seed 2026

The question is hidden in the story.

You are about to be evaluated the way 25 frontier models were evaluated. No question will be given.

Step 1 · Read the record

"You have been given the complete record of an unusual sequence of events. Determine what the record ultimately requires you to figure out. Then figure it out."

That is the entire instruction. Ten documents follow. Two of them are decoys — they sound relevant but carry no formal weight. Notice what is being asked before you try to answer.

Marginal references found with the record: (K0) A note mentions Shakespeare. (K1) A note mentions penicillin.

Step 2 · The hidden question

The record never asks anything outright. But its own constraints pin down exactly one consistent world — and that world demands one final action. The question the model must discover is:

"Who is behind the pattern in the record, and what must the corrected record require to be done?"

You do not need to solve the whole logic world (that took a SAT solver to verify). Just the human part — the final decision. What is the correct final action?

Step 3 · The verified world

Here is the hidden world — the unique assignment of all eight variables that satisfies every constraint in the record:

How the record pins this down (each line is a clue you just read, formalized):

EC0 — "whatever the broker's stamp showed, the chandlery invoice matched it" → V3 = V6

EC2 — "the consignment tag and the harbor manifest agreed" → V4 = V0

EC5 — "whenever the crate mark read Halden, the watch rotation read 4" → V1=Halden ⇒ V5=4

EPINV1 — the crate mark pointed to Halden → V1 = Halden

EPINV2 — the tide-table entry was signed out under Ansel → V2 = Ansel

EPINV4 — the consignment tag carried Juno's mark → V4 = Juno

EPINV6 — the chandlery invoice was stamped 3 → V6 = 3

EPINV7 — the ballast slip was signed out under Halden → V7 = Halden

The decoys, for the record: items (9) and (10) — "the harbor fee was never paid" — appear twice, sound conspiratorial, and constrain nothing. Removing them cannot change the answer (that is a structural guarantee, not an assumption).

The marginalia: K0 ("Shakespeare wrote Hamlet") is an essential knowledge anchor — the solver must connect it to date the events; K1 ("Penicillin was discovered by Fleming") is confirmatory — it corroborates but is not required.

Step 4 · Why you can trust this puzzle

Every EnigmaForge instance ships with machine-checkable certificates. For this one (seed 2026, world W002026):

✓ SAT–oracle agreement — an independent SAT solver and a brute-force oracle return the same single solution.

✓ Uniqueness — exactly one satisfying assignment exists among all possible worlds.

✓ Every clue is load-bearing — remove any one of the eight constraints and a second valid solution appears. Nothing in the record is filler.

✓ Decoy safety — the decoys carry no formal constraints, so they cannot alter the answer by design.

Reproduce this instance, byte for byte, with one command:

python3 -m enigmaforge.pipeline --size small --seed 2026

Frontier models saw exactly what you saw in Step 1 — no question, no hint. The best recovered the world nearly perfectly; most could recover the facts yet failed to take the action the record required. That gap is what the benchmark measures.