Battle-Tested Research Prompts

An elegant, curated gallery of research prompts with proven yield — the actual prompts (and full transcripts) that frontier AI labs released alongside significant, verified research results.

The Gallery

OpenAI

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Cycle Double Cover Conjecture	Graph theory	Complete proof of the CDC conjecture (all finite bridgeless loopless multigraphs), via GPT 5.6 Sol Ultra with 64-agent adversarial search	2026
First Proof? — solve/verify/refine templates	Competition mathematics	Programmatic pipeline producing model-verified solutions to 1stproof.org problems (3/4 correct on the BSS seed idea for Problem #6)	Feb 2026
Gluon → graviton single-minus amplitudes	Quantum gravity	ChatGPT 5.2 Pro generalized the gluon amplitudes paper to gravity from a one-paragraph research instruction, producing the preprint "Single-minus graviton tree amplitudes are nonzero". Full 110-page conversation transcript released	Feb 28, 2026
Goemans cost conjecture	Combinatorial optimization / network flows	Counterexample found by Dmitry Rybin / GPT-5.6 Pro; independently kernel-checked in Lean 4	Jul 22, 2026

Recent / peer review pending

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Crouzeix conjecture	Matrix analysis	Candidate proof from Shanmu Jin / GPT-5.6 Sol — recent / peer review pending	Aug 2026

FrontierMath / independent researchers

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Absolute Galois group of Q₂	Number theory	Explicit presentation of the absolute Galois group of Q₂, with two independent Lean formalizations and finite-quotient verification	Jun 24 / Jul 26, 2026
White + Mason matroid conjectures	Matroid theory	Computer-free counterexamples to White's strong conjecture and Mason's log-concavity conjecture, found with GPT-5.5 Pro and preserved in public chat logs	Jul 2, 2026

Anthropic

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
De novo protein binder design campaign	Computational biology	Wet-lab-confirmed binders against 14/15 targets; 22–35% hit rates vs. 10–15% human baseline; state-of-the-art affinities. ~30k-token autonomous campaign prompt + kickoff messages	Aug 18, 2026
Automated W2S researcher	AI alignment research	9 parallel Claude Opus 4.6 agents reached PGR 0.97 vs. 0.23 human baseline on weak-to-strong supervision. Full prompt stack published (system prompt + skill + critic prompts, MIT)	Apr 14, 2026

Google DeepMind / Google Research

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Co-Scientist agent prompts & research goals	Biomedical hypothesis generation	Nature-published multi-agent system; lab-validated AML repurposing (KIRA6), anti-fibrotic targets (91% response blockade), and re-discovery of unpublished cf-PICI mechanism	May 19, 2026

Academic / other labs

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
SPARK — System of Pathology Agents	Cancer pathology	Nature Medicine: autonomous hypothesis→code→validation pipeline produced survival-validated prognostic biomarkers on real patient cohorts. Full CrewAI agent/task prompts published	Apr 29, 2026

Methodology / autonomous AI-math

Entry	Field	Yield	Date
Autonomous sum-product disproofs	Additive combinatorics / AI-math methodology	GPT-5.5 Pro's three-stage plan→construct→review pipeline produced correct proofs in 7 of 8 independent trials; code, transcripts, and generated proofs released	Jul 9, 2026

Yield criteria (firm)

All four requirements must hold for a prompt to enter this gallery:

1. The prompt is available — released verbatim by its source (PDF, dataset, or web page) and collected here as a copy-paste-runnable .md file.
2. It is related to a research task — mathematics, science, or engineering discovery, not a demo or toy.
3. It is battle-tested — actually used in the run that produced the result, not a post-hoc reconstruction.
4. It produced significant yield in its field — a result independently validated by publication in a peer-reviewed venue, wet-lab confirmation, formal verification (e.g. Lean), or expert review. The yield is stated concretely in every entry README.

Never include a prompt without a proven yield.

Usability requirement: the published prompt must carry the causal weight of the yield. Entries whose published prompts are one-liners (or otherwise insubstantial) while the actual instructions lived in undisclosed harness system prompts, skills, or project instructions are unusable and are excluded — this repository collects useful prompts, not exercises in reverse-engineering hidden context. Every entry README still discloses whatever user-authored context remains unpublished (harness configs, tool schemas) so yields are never overstated.

Conventions

• Hard requirement: every entry contains one or more pure prompt files (named prompt*.md) whose entire content is the prompt — no commentary, no headers, no provenance notes. Copy the file's full content and run it verbatim. Supporting material (provenance, analysis, transcripts, context) lives in separate files (README.md, *-context.md, transcript.md, etc.).
• Each entry lives in prompts/<lab>-<entry>/ (flat — no per-company nesting) with:
  • README.md — metadata table (lab, model, field, yield, date, sources) and analysis of the prompt techniques that worked.
  • prompt*.md — the verbatim, runnable prompt(s).
  • Full transcripts where released.
• Extraction provenance is documented in the entry README or context file; the original source is always linked and authoritative.

Rejected entries

Candidate	Rejected because
Anthropic — Riemann zeta 67.2% critical-line bound (Aug 10, 2026)	Has hidden, undiscoverable user prompts: the published human inputs are one-liners ("Take a real stab at the Riemann hypothesis", "Keep going / Believe in yourself"); the yield derives from an unreleased research model's hidden harness system prompt, skills, and CLAUDE.md-style instructions. Unusable — deleted.
Anthropic — NMR / LC-MS analytical-chemistry one-liners (Aug 18, 2026)	Same character: two-sentence prompts whose yield is attributable to the unpublished Claude Science harness and skills. Deleted from the protein-design entry.
OpenAI — Graviton amplitudes preprint alone (cdn.openai.com/pdf/graviton.pdf, Mar 4, 2026)	The preprint itself contains no prompts. The graviton work was ACCEPTED via its companion transcript release (gluon-to-graviton-paper.pdf), which publishes the full ChatGPT conversation — see the Gluon → graviton entry.