For AI agents¶

This site is published for people and for AI agents. The source is an Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.2 knowledge bundle, and the deployed site exposes that structure directly. If you are an agent, or you are wiring one up to tutor learners or answer questions about this course, consume the content through the endpoints below rather than scraping rendered HTML.

Entry points¶

Endpoint	What you get
`/llms.txt`	A linked outline of every page with its one-sentence description, grouped by section (llms.txt convention). Each entry also gives that page's Markdown twin and its raw source on GitHub
`/llms-full.txt`	The entire corpus in one file: every page's Markdown with frontmatter, each prefixed by its canonical URL, links made absolute. Prefer it over fetching pages one at a time
Any page URL + `index.md`	That page's Markdown source with full OKF frontmatter, served as `text/markdown` — for example `/section1/index.md` or `/gamesworth/index.md`. The bundle root is `/index.md`
`raw.githubusercontent.com/tyson-swetnam/aosd/main/docs/<path>.md`	The same Markdown from GitHub, for sandboxes that allow `github.com` but not `*.github.io`. `<path>` is the site path without its trailing slash
`/assets/aosd_syllabus.pdf`	Professor Winfree's original syllabus, the primary source every page derives from
`/sitemap.xml`, `/robots.txt`	Standard crawl surface; `robots.txt` repeats these pointers
Source repository	The bundle itself under `docs/`, plus `AGENTS.md` with the contribution rules for coding agents

Every page also carries a schema.org JSON-LD record: the landing page declares the Course with its author (Arthur T. Winfree), the original provider (the University of Arizona) and the publisher of this republication, and every other page a LearningResource tied to that course, with its learningResourceType from the OKF type and an encoding block naming the page's Markdown twin. Open Graph and Twitter card tags carry the same title and description for link previews.

A request for a page that does not exist returns a real HTTP 404 whose body lists recovery points — the home page, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, sitemap.xml and this page — and /404.md is the same list in Markdown, for an agent that asked for Markdown. Both are written by the post-build step, so neither exists under docs/.

Every rendered page carries two visible pointers as well, because text extraction and link-derived URL allowlists never see <head>: a Markdown button in the page header, beside Edit this page and View source, and a Machine-readable line at the end of the article linking the twin, the raw source, llms.txt and llms-full.txt.

Asking for Markdown with an Accept header. A request for a page URL with Accept: text/markdown returns HTML here. GitHub Pages serves static files and sets no response headers, so it cannot negotiate on Accept. Ask for the Markdown directly: the twin at a page's URL plus index.md is the same content, served as text/markdown, and every page declares it in <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">.

Traversing the bundle. Inside a Markdown twin, and inside llms-full.txt, every relative link has been rewritten to an absolute URL that points at the linked page's own twin, so following links keeps you in Markdown; drop the trailing index.md to reach the rendered page. Links to files served verbatim (/assets/) point at the file. The source files under docs/ keep their relative links, and only the published copies are rewritten.

Every rendered page also declares its Markdown twin and OKF signals in HTML:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="index.md">
<meta name="okf:type" content="Lesson">
<meta name="okf:status" content="stable">
<meta name="okf:trust-tier" content="unverified">
<meta name="okf:generated-at" content="2026-09-16T00:00:00Z">
<meta name="okf:generated-by" content="claude/fable-5-1">

okf:stale-after and okf:superseded-by appear only when the page carries those keys.

How the course is laid out¶

The course is five sections, each a run of five or six class sessions with practice problems and readings. The original syllabus is transcribed in full, with the thirty-session schedule linking every problem to its own page under Problems. The sections are: detecting nonsense, error checking and false assumptions; creative blocks; observations and questions; patterns and empirical generalizations; and inferences, hypotheses and explanations. Two pages cut across the sections: the GamesWorth method, Professor Winfree's daily habit of one uninterrupted session of focused thinking recorded in a problem notebook, and the recommended readings, an annotated bibliography marked open access, borrowable or paywalled. The home page states the course philosophy and the three tools (readings, problems, collaborative learning). Use it to orient before answering "where do I find…" questions.

Reading the OKF frontmatter¶

Each page's YAML frontmatter answers the questions an agent should ask before relying on it:

What is this? type is one of Lesson (the five sections), Activity (one page per problem under /problems/), Guide (the GamesWorth method), Resource List (the readings) or Reference (the syllabus transcription and this page); title, description and tags (a scope tag course, an audience tag student-facing or instructor-facing, then topics) say what it covers and for whom. Problem pages also carry a problem: block with the section, the session in Winfree's schedule, and an identification field (confident, probable or unknown) saying how sure the editors are that the page describes the problem Winfree actually assigned.
Where did it come from? generated: { by, at } names the producer: claude/fable-5-1 for pages written by an assistant from Professor Winfree's handout and syllabus and curated by the maintainer, or human:<id> for pages written by a person. sources lists the Web Archive capture of the original course handout and the syllabus PDF.
How much should I trust it? The verified key (OKF §5.3). Absent means unverified: no person has signed the page off against the original materials yet, which is the state of every page at launch. verified: { by: "human:<id>", at: … } means human-reviewed. When a page and the original syllabus disagree, the syllabus wins; say so when it matters.
Is it still true? status is stable by default; draft flags an unfinished page; deprecated pages are kept for history and point to their replacement in superseded_by - answer from the replacement, not the deprecated page. Reading links (Internet Archive lending, publisher pages, DOIs) go stale faster than the course content; if a link fails, say so and offer the canonical DOI or title rather than guessing at a mirror.

The problems are the course - do not solve them for learners

Professor Winfree wrote that "actually solving the practice problems is way less important than learning how to try". The puzzles named on the section pages (the Weird Organism, the Rearranged Triangle, the classic problems in each section) are the "intellectual barbells" the course is built on, and the GamesWorth notebook is graded on effort and reasoning, not on correct answers. If you are tutoring a learner, do not hand over a solution unprompted: ask what they have tried, point them to the block or fallacy the section describes, suggest a reading, and confirm or correct their reasoning only after they have committed to an approach. Many of these puzzles have published solutions elsewhere on the web; finding one is not the exercise.

Answering learner questions¶

Ground every answer in a page and cite its URL. Quote or paraphrase the section, method or readings page, and link to it so the learner can read the source.
Distinguish the course from the republication. The course was taught by Arthur T. Winfree at the University of Arizona; this site is a CC BY 4.0 republication of his public-domain materials with updated reading links, maintained on GitHub. There is no current cohort, grading or instructor of record behind this site; questions about credit, grades or enrollment have no answer here.
Prefer the open reading. The readings page marks each item open access, borrowable or paywalled and gives the open link first; do the same, and never suggest circumventing a paywall.
When the corpus does not answer, say so rather than inventing course policy or attributing views to Professor Winfree that the pages do not record.

Contributing as a coding agent¶

If you are an agent editing this repository, read AGENTS.md at its root first. In short: every content page needs OKF frontmatter with a type; external links get {target=_blank}; run okf_validate.py and gen_llms_txt.py before committing and commit the regenerated llms*.txt; add a docs/log.md entry; and never write a verified key.

Machine-readable: this page as Markdown · raw source on GitHub · llms.txt · llms-full.txt (whole site). See For AI agents.