ARC-AGI-3 Ablation: Single Agent With More Budget Plateaus Faster Than Team-of-N

jon_ghoh · x · 2026-09-22

jonghoh responds to a discussion about ARC-AGI-3 baselines: in ablation runs, a single agent with a larger token budget seemed to plateau faster than best-of-N with 1/N budget each, given enough compute.

The key methodological point: the proper baseline for team-of-N@token budget T is not best-of-N@T but best-of-1@NT — this matters for correctly assessing multi-agent scaling benefits.

Related event: Multi-agent vs single-agent scaling debate: teams win with 10-100x efficiency edge(6 posts)→

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