14. THE WOODEN IDOL

The Wooden Idol is an open mathematical challenge asking whether a specific kind of structure can exist — one that is self-sustaining and never-ending, but that cannot be proved complete, cannot be fully described from the inside, and cannot be pinned down the way normal mathematical objects can be. It sets out twelve conditions such a structure would have to satisfy simultaneously, then tests whether they contradict each other. No contradiction has been found, but no proof of existence has been found either. 

The most striking of the twelve conditions is B3: it says there must be a region where something stabilises things, but the mechanism of that stabilisation is not assumed to exist analytically — you can observe it acting but you cannot name what does the acting. Hurricane data from 216 Atlantic storms shows a 7.99 degree gap between what the underlying geometry predicts and what the storms actually do, and that gap may be B3 in the physical world. A universe simulator built alongside the document found the same kind of behaviour computationally — attractors that act without being derivable. The document does not claim to solve the problem. It claims to have measured the shape of what remains unsolved.