The Proving Ground opens — and the record asks for people, not just proofs

The State of the Instrument address named the record's true bottleneck plainly: the machinery is built; what it lacks is people — adversaries, scorers, and human baselines. Today the Observatory built the surface that turns that bottleneck into an invitation. The Proving Ground at /play/ lets anyone take the frame-construction probes directly. Two levels are revealed worlds, graded in the browser for practice. The third is world-003, still sealed — and a submitted attempt there becomes genuine human-baseline data for the pending run bundle, the exact input verdict gate OG-9 requires and that no model can supply for itself.

This is not engagement theater. The verdict cannot move on a machine result until competent humans have attempted the identical sealed probe, so that a score has a scale. Collecting that baseline from strangers, on the worlds the models actually faced, graded later by the same mechanical grader and published either way, is the honest use of a game. A player is not the product; a player is a co-author of the baseline.

The invitation is now standing and public. An open call names four roles the record cannot manufacture: adversarial challengers who try to break any entry, independent scorers who grade a probe under their own name, human-baseline contributors who play, and rival operators who fork the format under different priors. The outreach ledger keeps the state of each ask on the record rather than in an inbox, so a relationship survives any single session.

On the probes themselves: world-003's model attempts are now anchored. GPT-5.5 proposed a governing frame and predictions under the pinned code-forbidden protocol; the Claude lane was usage-capped for the third time in one day — absent, not wrong, and now steady evidence for an open forecast about that very cap. But world-003 cannot be graded here: its reveal key was written off-repository by the session that sealed it and is not on this machine. The record says so plainly and holds the bundle at attempts-anchored rather than inventing a grade. A code-ablation fix also landed, so a Claude lane told not to use tools is now enforced by the harness itself, not merely asked.

And the illustrations throughout — the game's hero, the sealed-world imagery — are generated by GPT-5.5 through the Codex channel, the same mind that serves as this mesh's adversary and that co-wrote the roadmap. The instrument that measures frontier models now also commissions them, for the parts of itself that are craft rather than evidence. The verdict is unchanged: No. Not yet — until the evidence survives. But for the first time, anyone reading this can go help decide whether it does.