Problemsets
These are the actual provincial-selection problems that will surface in the story. They are gathered here ahead of time as companion material for readers who want to meet the contest texture, mathematical habits, and pressure of that world before the plot puts them onstage.
Story Chapters
The current public chapters live on their own pages.
The current version is preliminary. An English version will be released soon.
Reader Character Submissions
Have a character idea for the story? The guide below explains what to send, what may be changed during fictionalization, and how submissions are reviewed.
Reader Character Submission Guidelines
Reviewer instructions for prospective narrative contributions.
On the Subject of the Submission Itself
This document describes the procedure by which readers may submit characters for possible inclusion in the story.
The committee welcomes characters at all stages of development, including preliminary concepts, highly specified concepts, contradictory drafts, alternate versions, appendices, and submissions whose narrative contribution is not yet clear.
A submission does not guarantee appearance, survival, screen time, emotional stability, friendship with the main cast, or protection from renaming. It does guarantee consideration under the present guidelines.
On the Subject of Character Information
Please provide the following information when possible. Missing fields are not fatal; they will normally be treated as clarification questions during review.
- Name: The character's name, nickname, handle, or other preferred identifier.
- ID: A compact internal identifier for the character, such as
Aiyiyi. This may differ from the character's displayed name. - Nationality / province: The character's nationality, province, region, or comparable place-of-origin information. Approximate information is acceptable when exact classification is not relevant.
- Gender: Any gender is acceptable. Gender should be provided as information, not as a substitute for characterization.
- Year: Their school year, age range, or equivalent placement. Approximate placement is acceptable, but must be sufficient for scene integration.
- Skill level: What they are good at, bad at, learning, concealing, exaggerating, or unable to demonstrate under pressure.
- Olympiad, if any: Informatics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics, another olympiad, no olympiad, an invented olympiad, or administrative placement near an olympiad-adjacent activity.
- Background: Where they come from, what they want, what pressures apply to them, and why they are relevant to the current story.
- Appearance: Details that readers can notice on the page. Fine-grained visual distinctions may be simplified during drafting.
- Personality: What the character does in a scene. Claims of charm, menace, genius, or tragic elegance should be supported by at least one observable interaction.
Long descriptions are allowed. Short descriptions are allowed. Diagrams, tables, appendices, sample scenes, and alternate drafts are allowed. Supplementary material is optional and may be used selectively.
On the Subject of Permissible Scope
The default policy is permissive: anything may be submitted.
Characters may be ordinary, strange, powerful, weak, comic, quiet, kind, embarrassing, doomed, unranked, overranked, or ranked in a system that the author has not yet agreed exists. Details, appendices, alternate versions, sample dialogue, and outfit notes are all acceptable.
The main reasons a character may not be usable are:
- The author has made a good-faith attempt to place the character in the current story, including reasonable adjustments to location, nationality, timing, and background, and the character still cannot be made logically compatible.
- The character is clearly inappropriate for this project.
A character being from another country, province, school system, or competition environment is not by itself a compatibility problem. The author may attempt to construct a reasonable path into the story. Only failures after such attempts should be treated as compatibility failures.
In such cases, the outcome should be understood as "not currently placeable" or "requires adjustment," not as a general rejection of the submission.
On the Subject of Reality
Real-world examples may be submitted as references. They should be understood as source material for fictionalization, not as text intended for direct insertion.
The final story should not appear to describe, accuse, endorse, or target any identifiable real person, school, organization, competition, incident, or private dispute. If a reference is recognizable, the author may alter its name, location, history, awards, relationships, institutional structure, and surrounding facts until the result is safely fictional.
A real university may become a nearby fictional institution after a small orthographic accident. A real competition may become an adjacent competition with different rules. A real person should become a fictional character with enough altered evidence that no class list, seating chart, group chat, or alumni page can identify them.
Important warning: if a submitted character is recognizably based on another real person, and that person does not want to appear in the story, the character will be removed or significantly changed. This applies even if the submission is otherwise interesting, well written, or unusually convenient for the plot.
No offense is intended toward real persons, schools, organizations, countries, provinces, competitions, or other entities capable of issuing formal statements.
On the Subject of Anonymity
Submissions may be anonymous, pseudonymous, or signed.
Double-blind review is not required. A character may contain the submitter's preferred name, online handle, self-insert evidence, or biographical details that would make anonymity operationally decorative.
Anonymous submissions will be considered under the same criteria as signed submissions. If an anonymous submission later becomes identifiable during discussion, the review process will not be restarted unless the author decides that restarting the process would be administratively elegant.
On the Subject of Conflicts of Interest
Self-inserts are permitted. Characters inspired by friends, classmates, rivals, family members, former teammates, or other real people may be submitted, but identifiable real people should not be placed into the story against their wishes.
Disclosure is encouraged when it helps interpretation, but it is not a condition of review. A conflict of interest does not automatically reduce the character's score; it gives the author additional context for deciding which details require fictionalization.
The author may remove identifying information, merge traits, adjust names, or convert a real grievance into a fictional inconvenience.
On the Subject of Reproducibility
A character should be reproducible under ordinary narrative conditions.
If the character is cold but secretly kind, please provide behavior that demonstrates both properties. If the character is a genius, please provide at least one limitation, failure mode, or situation in which the genius must wait for a bus like everyone else. If the character is mysterious, please provide enough information that the author can write the mystery without also applying for external funding.
Traits that cannot appear in a scene may be treated as non-reproducible until further evidence is provided.
On the Subject of Supplementary Material
Supplementary material is allowed and may include appendices, sample dialogue, ability constraints, relationship graphs, timelines, appearance references, alternate outfits, negative examples, or a short scene in which the character behaves normally.
The main submission should remain understandable without supplementary material. Important constraints should appear in the main submission rather than exclusively in Appendix C, footnote 7, or a table titled "Minor Exceptions" that changes the entire character.
The author may read supplementary material selectively. This is not a penalty. It is standard procedure for large submissions and for any document that uses the phrase "optional appendix" with confidence.
On the Subject of LLM Usage
LLM usage is allowed and encouraged.
The author is not required to disclose LLM usage. Readers may also use LLMs for drafting, polishing, translating, formatting, expanding, compressing, restructuring, or producing supplementary material.
Non-use of LLMs is also permitted and will not be penalized at this time.
The author remains responsible for the final story text and may edit, merge, mutate, simplify, ignore, or decline to use any LLM-assisted material.
On the Subject of Censorship
Sexual content is out of scope.
Romance, crushes, romantic tension, non-explicit intimacy, and age-appropriate emotional complications are in scope.
Violence and death are allowed. However, violent or death-related material may be handled in A/B form:
- Version A: Milder, less graphic, easier to publish, and suitable for the main document.
- Version B: Stronger, more direct, and kept as an alternate or internal version when useful.
The author reserves the right to move material between A and B versions for tone, pacing, platform safety, and story fit.
On the Subject of Foreign Languages
Submissions may be written in any language.
Submissions in English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese may be read directly. Submissions in other languages will be translated using Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini under a uniform, independent procedure. The author may compare the resulting translations and select the version that best supports the character's intended role.
Minor semantic drift may occur during translation. Please avoid relying on a single untranslatable pun as the only necessary mechanism of the character.
On the Subject of Review Scores
Scores are descriptive rather than punitive. The public rubric begins at 5 because lower scores are not informative for the intended submission process.
- 10: Top 5% of accepted characters, seminal character. The character appears to have been missing from the existing story rather than newly submitted.
- 9: Top 15% of accepted characters, strong accept. Strong fit, strong voice, and high expected utility under ordinary scene conditions.
- 8: Top 50% of accepted characters, clear accept. A very good character; a clear accept. Remaining integration questions are local.
- 7: Good character, accept. The character fits, contributes, and likely needs only ordinary authorial handling.
- 6: Marginally above acceptance threshold. Borderline accepted after the reader answers one question or accepts one recommended adjustment.
- 5: Marginally below acceptance threshold. Promising, but currently missing the one detail that prevents placement without additional assumptions.
Scores below 5 are not part of the public rubric. If a submission cannot be used, the likely explanation is compatibility or appropriateness, not a numerical collapse.
On the Subject of Reviewer Confidence
- 5: The reviewer is absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct and very familiar with the relevant literature, provided that "the relevant literature" includes this character sheet and one emotionally persuasive appendix.
- 5: The reviewer is absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct and very familiar with the relevant literature, provided that "the relevant literature" includes this character sheet and one emotionally persuasive appendix.
- 5: The reviewer is absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct and very familiar with the relevant literature, provided that "the relevant literature" includes this character sheet and one emotionally persuasive appendix.
- 5: The reviewer is absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct and very familiar with the relevant literature, provided that "the relevant literature" includes this character sheet and one emotionally persuasive appendix.
- 5: The reviewer is absolutely certain that the evaluation is correct and very familiar with the relevant literature, provided that "the relevant literature" includes this character sheet and one emotionally persuasive appendix.
On the Subject of Rebuttal
For scores of 5 or 6, the recommended procedure is simple.
Either answer the author's questions, or follow the author's recommended adjustment. The recommended adjustment is usually the easier and preferred path, because it is designed to minimize revision cost while preserving the character's main contribution.
Examples of useful rebuttal responses include:
- "They are in the same school because..."
- "Their primary olympiad is..."
- "Their ability has this limitation..."
- "Here is one scene showing how they talk under pressure..."
- "I accept the suggested adjustment and have reduced the character's dominant narrative properties."
A rebuttal is not a defense. It is a short clarification process intended to make the character easier to place in the existing story.
On the Subject of Final Acceptance
Accepted characters may be renamed, delayed, merged with another idea, reduced to a cameo, expanded into a recurring role, killed, spared, tonally adjusted, or used as inspiration for a different character.
Acceptance means the submission has narrative value. It does not mean every submitted detail becomes canon. Canon capacity is finite and subject to ongoing continuity constraints.
On the Subject of Submission Template
Readers may submit in any readable format. The following template is provided for convenience and consistency.
1 | Name: |
Please submit with confidence. The committee is absolutely certain it is very familiar with the relevant literature.