AI agents burned 10B+ tokens on a deletion channel problem open since the 1960s
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-16
Researcher Dimitris Papail recounts setting AI agents loose on the capacity of the deletion channel, a problem open since the 1960s.
- The agents consumed over 10 billion tokens mixing old and new approaches, but did not fully resolve the problem.
- His takeaway: reality has no obligation to fit the kind of paper we'd most enjoy reading — some problems demand an unappealing patchwork of arguments plus the brute force of a thousand GPU hammers.
- A rare first-hand experiment on whether AI agents can do genuinely open-ended mathematical research.
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