Accepted Papers

Verifiable Problems Track

Papers submitted against problems with automatically checkable solutions, including the curated problem set.

• A Forced-Structure Reduction and Verifiable Bounds for Conway's 99-Graph

  Aalok Thakkar Best Paper Award

• Verifier-Clean Connected Still Lifes Across All Box Sizes: A Complete CP-SAT Encoding with Annealing Polish

  Venkata Pushpak Teja Menta

• How Dense Can a Connected Still Life Be? Records, Proven Optima, and Machine-Checked Certificates up to n = 32

  Akshat Singh Jaswal

• Exhaustive k-Flip Analysis of the Maximum Determinant Problem for 23x23 ±1 Matrices: Proving the Orrick Record as a Strict 5-Flip Local Maximum and Discovering a Second Basin

  Chandan B K, Sumukh M G, Pramodh Krishna, Anshul

• Proving Optimality of the 48-mer Unger–Moult HP Benchmark via Simulated Annealing and a Tight Polyomino Bound
• Connected Still Life Across an AI-Inclusive Cognitive Ecosystem: A Verifier-Attested Case Study

  Mike Collier, Brian Derfer

• Still Life, Still Living: An LLM Coding Agent’s Trajectory on Connected Game-of-Life Patterns

  Sagar Reddy, John Michael Sujay Zakkam, Sai Rithvik Kanakamedala, Saili Myana, Sri Sindhu Gunturi

• Grid-Accelerated Pivot REMC for HP Protein Folding on the 2D Square Lattice

  Daksh Rathod, Khamir Desai

• Recombining Local Optima in Conway’s Strongly Regular Graph Problem

  Vatsal Shah

• Hybrid Exact and Heuristic Search for Dense Connected Still Lifes

  Praveen Sridhar

• The Cost of Connectivity: Exact and Heuristic Bounds for the Connected Maximum Density Still Life Problem

  Tanay Sodha

• A Spanning-Tree Encoding for the Connected Maximum Still-Life Problem

  Ahmad A Rushdi

• A Compact 50-Contact Conformation for the S10 Hydrophobic–Polar Lattice Protein

  Vatsal Shah

Open-Ended Problems Track

Papers addressing fundamental science problems where correctness cannot be automatically verified.