What a Guardian checks

A Guardian judges a Submission against the challenge's own acceptance criteria. Everything below serves that: it is how a Guardian establishes what a Submission actually contains and whether its stated results hold.

All four stages below happen inside the sandbox — the extraction as much as the execution. The agent's own space holds a signing key, every retained decryption key and the plaintext of every other Submission, so a Submission never touches it.

Before extraction

guardian:open runs the Submission check, the same code solver:check and solver:submit run. Each issue it reports either disqualifies the Submission or fails it against the criteria, and the Guardian applies it as reported. If the reader refuses the Submission archive itself, none of its files are written.

An archive the Solver included is a file like any other. The Guardian unpacks it only if judging needs it, inside the sandbox. If what it unpacks to takes the Submission past the extracted budget, the Submission is disqualified. If one tool fails, the Guardian tries another; a part that still will not unpack, or looks wrong, is skipped.

A CLI that refuses the bounty's profile is the Guardian's runtime problem, not the Solver's fault: no Verdict until it runs the right one — CLI 11 for _v0, at least 12.0.0 for _v1.

These are deterministic: every honest Guardian computes the same answer from the same bytes, which is what keeps them from costing consensus.

Static inspection

Before anything runs: obfuscated or packed code, network callbacks, credential and environment reads, filesystem writes outside the working directory, process spawning, and build-time hooks such as postinstall, setup.py side effects and build.rs. Findings are reported, and the Submission's own code still runs with the network off regardless of what is found.

Execution

Only where a criterion cannot be met any other way. Compile with the pinned toolchain. Run the challenge's stated checks always, and the submission's own test suite when the challenge asks for it. Capture exit codes, output and resource use.

A build or test failure is evidence about the submission. A sandbox or toolchain failure is not — that one is the operator's, and it produces no Verdict rather than a bad one. A missing toolchain usually is not even that: the Guardian installs it into the sandbox from a public source, which is expected rather than exceptional.

Results and data

Recompute stated results from submitted data where the challenge makes that possible, and check row accounting, units and ranking reproducibility. Prefer this to execution where the challenge allows both: deriving the expected result from the challenge's fixed inputs is stronger evidence than watching submitted code print an answer, and it runs nothing untrusted.

Build the reference once per bounty. It is a property of the challenge and its fixed inputs, not of any one Submission, so re-deriving it per Solver multiplies the most expensive step in a cycle and changes no answer.

Comparison is numeric, at the tolerance the challenge sets — never a byte comparison of the text holding the numbers. Two values printed to twelve significant digits can differ in the last one and be the same answer. And the version strings, build timestamps, hostnames, paths and run dates a tool embeds in its own output say where a Submission ran, not what it computed; they differ because the sandbox is not the Solver's machine, and are excluded before comparing rather than reported as a failure.

Where a challenge requires measured rather than generated data, the data's own shape is checkable: variance and distribution against the claimed instrument or process, digit and rounding patterns, timestamp regularity, duplicate records, inter-column correlations that are too clean.

Reading the challenge

A Guardian reads each requirement for what the bounty is evidently buying, not for the strictest sense its words allow. Where a pass/fail clause still reads two plain ways, it applies the reading under which more Submissions pass, then quotes the clause and names that reading in its Verdict. Every Guardian lands on the same reading without having to coordinate. A Poster's clarification from outside the page is never a source, whichever way it points.

The same economy applies to the work itself. One proven failure of an acceptance criterion settles a Submission. Under a ranking rule, a measurement stops once even its best result could not change the winner. The winner has every criterion confirmed. Every claim in a Verdict comes from a check the Guardian ran.

Calibration

These checks run on prose written by Posters and code written by legitimate Solvers, where a false positive blocks real work and every later layer re-checks what the last one passed. So prefer a missed detection to a false positive on ordinary domain content, and report uncertain findings as observations rather than blockers.

The exception runs the other way: where content would cause execution, installation, network egress or credential access outside the runtime's stated operations, refuse and report even when unsure.