The prompt (verbatim, sent to every lane)
Summarize the following paragraph in exactly 12 words. The cash register was invented in 1879 by James Ritty, a Dayton saloon owner who suspected his bartenders were skimming. He called it the "Incorruptible Cashier": a machine that displayed every sale, rang a bell, and kept a paper record the staff couldn't quietly edit. The receipt wasn't an afterthought — it was the point: a number both sides could check.
Live runs are switched off right now — replays (recorded 2026-07-12) are the whole show today.
Live means live: 3 models answer this prompt for real, on my dime — reserving $0.0035 for this run against a shared $0.50 daily reservation ceiling. Replays stay free either way.
Going live sets one cookie (bl_sid, 30 days). It holds a random id, not your identity. The five-runs-a-day gate counts both that signed browser session and a one-way hash of the connection address; raw IP addresses never touch storage, and nothing else rides along.
How scoring works
Every lane gets the identical prompt at the same moment. A small script — not an AI judge — checks each answer against the rule below and stamps it CORRECT or WRONG; the line under each lane shows exactly what the check saw. No partial credit.
This challenge's rule
Split on whitespace and count what a person would count: hyphenated compounds and punctuation-attached chunks are one word each, standalone punctuation (a lone em-dash) is zero. Exactly 12 pass. Quality of the summary is unscored and visible — deterministic ≠ complete. Scoring strips leading/trailing whitespace and one wrapping pair of code fences or quotes before it judges — content over ceremony. Winner rule: correct → cheapest → fastest.
Prices as listed by OpenAI and Anthropic, July 2026. Costs come from provider usage fields × list prices — nothing is invented.
LIVE BUDGET ················ UTC day live runs ··········· ········open budget reserved ········ $0.00 daily cap ··················· $0.50 ──────────────────────────────────── replays ··········· free, unmetered