Ten ai agents just finished a proof that stood for 122 years in a single overnight run. ten claude…
ten ai agents just finished a proof that stood for 122 years in a single overnight run. ten claude sonnet 5.5 instances swapped 1,270 messages across 15 hours and wrote 17,895 lines of lean code to solve the thomson problem at n=7, with no human in the loop.
the math is old, the workflow is the news.
Context
Verified source: Vals AI's blog of Sep 28, 2026 says it asked ten Claude Sonnet 5.5 agents to prove in Lean that the pentagonal bipyramid is the lowest-energy arrangement of seven electrons on a sphere, and in about 15 hours they produced a 17,895-line proof. Startup Fortune (Sep 30) adds 1,270 messages and says two independent kernels verified it.
AlphaSignal says the proof imports only Mathlib and uses only standard Lean axioms.
The ten agents, 15 hours, 1,270 messages, 17,895 lines and the seven-charge case match the sources, and 1904 to 2026 is 122 years. That there was no human in the loop was not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. in the excerpts read, which say Vals AI asked the agents to do it. Startup Fortune notes caveats about the repository. 'The math is old, the workflow is the news' is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Vals AI post (mirror) ↗Sep 28, 2026.
- Startup Fortune ↗Sep 30, 2026.
- AlphaSignal ↗Proof summary.
Watch next
- Read the Vals AI post for how the agents were prompted and what human input there was.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 30 September 2026 at 22:17 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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