AI agents push 60-year-old deletion channel capacity problem to within 1/100 of a bit
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-16
UT Austin professor Alex Dimakis highlights that Dimitris Papail set AI agents loose on the deletion channel capacity — one of the most famous open problems in information theory, unresolved since the 1960s.
- The agents did not fully solve it, but after burning over 10 billion tokens they pushed the capacity estimate to within 1/100 of a bit, and published an article on the result
- Dimakis jokes about progress "by our AI overlords, prompted by Dimitris"
- The deletion channel capacity is a foundational open question in coding theory
A concrete, verifiable datapoint in the "AI doing math research" trend: not a full proof, but a quantifiable approximation on a classic hard problem.
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