500 Problems

In March 2026 the Problem Genome Project’s first public site drew each of its problem briefs as a small rosette — a generative drawing seeded by the brief’s eight-gene classification, domain at the center, time in the outermost halos. Five hundred briefs, collected in sixteen days of February, each with a face nobody drew by hand.

The glyphs were made to be looked at, not navigated, and as the site evolved toward usability they became period work: the corpus’s first drawn form. This print regenerates all five hundred from the exact March 17 commit, through the original rendering code, and fixes them at print scale — where their texture is the point.

The colophon tells the longer story: right theory at Harvard in 2013, stalled on expert supply; AI collection and human review solved it thirteen years later. When a corpus outgrows its first form, the first form becomes an artifact.