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The notation
Every one of the 613 problems is drawn with the same few moves. Ink carries everything structural. Colour carries two things and only two: the marks on the card — the painted swatch and one word of the title — are the problem’s field, and the pale ground behind them is the kind of hard. Each mark means exactly one thing, everywhere it appears. Learn this card once and you can read the whole collection.
A family of problems is drawn with one or two of these; kin families rhyme. Never more than two on a card, and a device appears only when it is true of the problem.
the gap — the divide the problem lives in (bench→field, plan→reality)
twin rules — the rulebook disagrees with itself (second rule short = measured wrong)
the box — things kept apart — silos, systems that won't talk
letterspace — stretched thin — waits, shortages, thin margins
the hollow word — the thing that's missing or being lost
the echo — two readings that don't agree (ghost repeat, slightly off)
the rising diagonal — getting worse (temporal trajectory; level = static)
the step-down — a cliff — capability or supply about to drop
…plus the one mark every card can carry: the colored word — the subject at stake, set in its field's color. It appears when the title names the subject; not every title does.
Behind every card is a pale band for each of its binding constraints — within one card, the commoner the constraint the wider its band. The same constraints appear as ink ticks in the header, each in a fixed lane — so two problems stuck for the same reasons carry the same ticks, whatever field they come from. A constraint carried by more than half the collection is assumed rather than drawn, which is why a card with no ticks means nothing unusual here, not no data.
The tints below name the lanes; they are close cousins by design and are not meant to be told apart by colour alone — the lane position, and the words on every surface that shows a card, carry the identification.
Sibling fields inside a group share the hue at lighter steps.
Bigger dot = stronger source; a dashed dot needs sourcing. Dashed means uncertain everywhere on this site.
Printed bottom-left on every card. A date bottom-right means the problem expires; a tilted title means it’s getting worse.
Eight axes describe every problem; choose any value to see its carriers.
The collection’s previous notation — the round genome glyphs of 2026 — is kept as period work: see a plate in the previous notation →