Order chosen by Manifold's alphabetical sort across this market's answers.
An answer is valid if Claude says that the string constitutes an unambiguous description of a number in natural English.
(Reserve the right to tweak these rules.)
If you think you know of one that comes before all the current answers, submit it! Resolves once one answer has stood undefeated for a month.
There will be no AI clarifications added to this market's description.
1,000@IsaacKing Since no one has traded/added answers to this market for over a month, whatever the top qualifying choice from A-Z is should resolve YES. I asked Opus 4.8 whether "0" counted as an unambiguous description of a number in natural English, and it said (see below). In sort, 'A Baker's Dozen' should resolve YES.
"Short answer: I'd say no.
"0" is unambiguous as a reference to a number, but it isn't a description in natural English. It's a numeral — a symbol in the Hindu-Arabic positional notation system, which is language-independent. The same glyph appears identically in French, Indonesian, and Japanese text; nothing about it is English. What's English is the word "zero," which is a different string. A description in a language should be composed of that language's lexical material, and a bare digit isn't.
There's also a name/description distinction lurking. "A baker's dozen" or "the smallest prime" describe a number via English predicates. "0" doesn't describe anything — it just denotes, the way a numeral does. Even if you're generous and treat naming as a species of describing, the "in natural English" clause still does the excluding work.
The counter-case, to be fair: written English orthography routinely embeds Arabic numerals, and any competent English reader renders "0" as "zero" on sight. If "in natural English" just means "intelligible to an English reader in ordinary written English," a digit clears that bar. That reading is defensible — it's just a weaker reading of the clause than the market seems to intend.
Two contextual notes that push the same direction. Isaac has said the earlier resolution criteria didn't capture the spirit of the market, and when asked whether the judge would be told that a pure string of digits can't be in the market's spirit, he said that wasn't his plan — which reads less like disagreement with the premise than reluctance to prime the judge. Meanwhile Ahron Maline has explicitly said he thinks "0" should be disqualified as a digit rather than English, and hedged with whitespace tricks accordingly.
So: the whitespace-padded "0" currently sitting at 63% looks vulnerable, and the real contest is probably between the 'A Baker's Dozen' variants and whatever the whitespace-stripping rule turns out to be. Worth noting the hex line of attack has the same problem in reverse — "A" as a hex digit is a numeral that happens to be letter-shaped, which is a coincidence of glyph, not a fact about English."
I'm copying @vi's trick of adding spaces, because I think 0 should be disqualified as a digit rather than English.
Maybe Isaac or Claude will decide that whitespace should be stripped before computing alphabetical order. In that case, the single quotes should do the job.
If all symbols are excluded from the alphabetical order, then the @ in @aaaaa's age at birth is also removed, and this answer beats the other A baker's dozen because of the capital B.
Damn. I was trying to be careful to make my bets without ever taking A baker's dozen out of the top spot, so the 30-day counter wouldn't reset. But the shift in probabilies was different from what the site predicted. I apologize to anyone else who's impatient about this.
But anyway @IsaacKing , if you want to actually set reliable rules, now's a good time to do so.
@IsaacKing think we're gonna need some more guidance here. How does an answer "stand undefeated for a month" when nobody is sure which answers are valid?
@AhronMaline +1!!! Came here to ask the same. Perhaps Isaac can already go ahead and solve as N/A any answers that are not considered valid in the first place?
https://claude.ai/share/1d4b5cf5-c36c-4bbb-a0b2-1e14c02f054a
I came up with this, which complies with the letter of the rules. That said, it suggests an infinite family of progressively alphabetically earlier numbers, which would mean there is no true answer.
@AllenLiu how does it make any sense that ordinary decimal would not count, but hexadecimal would?
@IsaacKing you have us swinging at ghosts here...
@AhronMaline Cause hex digits are letters? I admit it's not my favorite answer right now, but I figured it had enough of a chance that it was worth adding.
@AllenLiu Huh. Weirdly enough, my Claude agrees with you:
https://claude.ai/share/d6c4c507-123d-4fb5-a8c3-8724019dcf1d
But note that this is Sonnet 4.5 (I don't have the paid version since I use Gemini). I assume Isaac will use Opus 4.5 as the judge.
@AhronMaline I think there is also the problem that in hexadecimal numbers the A represents 10, not A, so it alphabetizes after 9
@JussiVilleHeiskanen that would be hilarious. But I'm pretty sure alphabetization works with characters, regardless of their meaning