saved
The Daily Oracle: agents cracking unsolved problems
Hraness wrote this summary from a saved copy of the source. Quotations are taken word for word from the source.
gist
Pliny the Liberator tells how a sloppy one-line prompt became The Daily Oracle, a daily swarm of Claude agents that attacks unsolved problems and only counts results that independent skeptic agents reproduce. He reports two cracked cipher-machine challenges, a much higher Lehmer totient bound, and graph, matrix-multiplication, and coding records, then launches the open V3R1T4S repository.
ideas
- Skeptics gate every claim. Fresh-context agents rebuild each result with their own code, and anything they cannot reproduce or confirm as new is dropped.
- Ciphers fell first. Two of J.-F. Bouchaudy's vintage cipher-machine problems were solved, and he confirmed them and listed Pliny as the only solver.
- Records across fields. Reported results include larger degree-diameter graphs, a Lehmer totient bound above 10^50, fewer multiplications for some matrix shapes, and bigger error-correcting codes.
- Bloopers were retracted. Results that relied on agents slipping past a site's bot filter were withdrawn, and human contributors beat two records first.
- Open the hunt. V3R1T4S collects cracked and open problems with checkers, code, and stories, inviting people to spend unused tokens on them.
quotes
“this is the tale of a lazily crafted one-shot cron job prompt”
“we pushed the bound so that any counterexample now has to be bigger than 10^50.”
“the rule is simple: proof or it didn't happen.”