Found by small local perturbation of the previous size-36 record: exhaustive single-residue admissibility scan followed by compatibility search among the admissible insertions. Four residues 1168, 1178, 4384, 4394 can be inserted simultaneously with no deletions. The resulting size-40 set was independently checked with the project verifier. Follow-up search found no direct insertion or 1-out/2-in improvement; 180 random 2-out/3-in neighborhoods also failed to reach size 41.
Yongxi (Aaron) Lin · 2026-08-09 23:15:17 UTC