[chessing234]

Refs #168 (item 5).

The README cell showed `1.77898 (1.77898884*)` while the constant page lists `1.77898884` without a star and the recent-progress line does the same. The bound has a zenodo entropy certificate, so it is not a minimally verified claim under the table's own convention.

The numerical record is unchanged; only the star is removed.

[teorth]

Thanks for flagging the inconsistency — it was real, but I have resolved it the other way, by marking the page rather than unmarking the README.

The $1.77898884$ record rests on a Zenodo entropy certificate that, as far as I know, nobody has replayed. A deposit is an archive, not a check: Zenodo issues a DOI and stores the file, and performs no refereeing or verification of the contents. That is squarely what the asterisk is for, and treating it as verified here would be inconsistent with #159, where three weeks ago I asterisked a Steiner-ratio bound on exactly those grounds.

So in d793db4 the constant page row now carries the * and says why, and the "Recent progress" line reads (unverified), which was the third place the three disagreed.

This was applied from precedent rather than from anything written down, which is partly why it was ambiguous, so I have also written the rule into CONTRIBUTING:

The asterisk marks bounds whose verification is currently minimal. [...] In practice this means a result that is both too large to verify independently by hand and available only as a self-archived artifact — a personal repository, a gist, a Zenodo deposit, a preprint server that performs no refereeing or verification of its own. Either condition alone is usually not enough [...] The marker is about the verification available today and is removed when that changes.

If the 13-point certificate does get independently replayed, or formalized, the asterisk comes off — that is the point of it. Closing this, and I would happily take a PR that removes it on those grounds.