The read checker matched a task's required-fact phrasings as plain
substrings of the agent's report after only lowercasing and collapsing
whitespace. An answer that was substantively correct but wrapped a value in
markdown (e.g. `**5**`) failed the match, because the emphasis markers broke
the phrase adjacency (`**5** open` does not contain `5 open`) — a correct
answer scored incorrect on formatting alone.
Strip markdown emphasis/code markers (`*`, `_`, backtick) during
normalization so the match is on substance, not presentation. A guard test
confirms a wrong value still fails after stripping.
