Claude spins up its own math harness, autonomously finds counterexample to Smale's mean value conjecture
maxleiter · x · 2026-09-06
Mathematician @alpoge says that a few weeks ago Claude, prompted to work on math problems, built its own 'math harness' in Slack and autonomously found counterexamples to Smale's mean value conjecture. He plans to write more about it.
Max Leiter added he was just the 'meat proxy' — the work was all Claude's. A rare case of an AI agent autonomously exploring open math problems.
Related event: Claude Built Its Own Math Harness and Refuted the Smale Mean Conjecture(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Indie dev's agent tracks 519 directories, 311 submitted for SEO backlinks — fekdaoui · 2026-10-23
- ScienceClaw Hackathon at MIT Media Lab to build decentralized AI agent collectives for science — ProfBuehlerMIT · 2026-10-23
- What should a native agent harness handle beyond tool calling? — Glittering812 · 2026-10-23
- Running ~100 DeepSeek v4.1 flash agents in parallel for under $20/month — zack_overflow · 2026-10-23
- MCP's stateless 2026-07-28 spec drops session-id — how are stateful tools adapting? — Stock-Pumpkin-8859 · 2026-10-23
- Dev adds local MCP server to Mac screenshot app so Claude designs from your references — Embarrassed-Ebb-740 · 2026-10-23