AI agents burned 10B tokens to crack a 1960s open problem to within 1/100 bit
DimitrisPapail · x · 2026-09-16
Dimitris Papailiopoulos shared an article: he asked AI agents to find the capacity of the deletion channel, a problem open since the 1960s. They did not fully resolve it, but after more than 10 billion tokens combining old and new techniques, they narrowed the capacity to within 1/100 of a bit. The follow-up discussion argues mathematics with AI may become like open source software: results become snippets to extend and improve, and exact attribution matters less—making results available saves experts time and compute, or gives them a better initializer for their next result.
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