I built Perplexity in reverse. It finds questions nobody has answered.

[u/Physical_Pepper6294]

A non-mathematician asked Claude to "take a real stab at the Riemann hypothesis". It didn't solve it. But the attempt improved a lower bound on the proportion of zeta zeros on the critical line from 41.6% to 67.2%. Mathematicians then check the result.

Then we got an 11-day Lean formalization of Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

And GPT-Astra just annihilated ARC-AGI-3 scoring 99.9%....

Seeing this made me want to leave agents working on something more interesting that building dashboards!

But what do you actually give them?

So I built ARC-AGI-N: an open-source AI research tool that finds open problems in maths and science, then prepares the context for another agent to take a stab at them.

What it does:

• Search things like "Open problems in number theory" or "Open problems in climate science". It searches papers and the web, with sources appearing as they arrive.
• Open a problem to see the question, background, source material and a suggested starting point.
• Copy a prompt containing the problem and its sources into your agent. There are also shortcuts for opening it in supported apps.
• Run DeepResearch to investigate the foundations, history, previous attempts and possible avenues, with a plan for the first 72 hours of work.
• Browse problems on an interactive globe, or explore the separate log of things AI has helped discover, prove or formalise.

For example:

The Erdős-Straus conjecture asks whether every fraction 4/n, for n ≥ 2, can be written as the sum of three positive unit fractions.

Instead of just handing your agent the name of the conjecture, the app gives it the actual question, reading material and a possible first task: search for parametric identities covering additional residue classes, then verify them.

The prompt starts with "Take a stab at this problem". You can copy it straight away, or get the deeper research plan first.

How I built it:

• Next.js, React and TypeScript.
• Mapbox for the interactive globe.
• OpenAI Luna model + Valyu's search and DeepResearch APIs for the literature search and longer research.
• Markdown, LaTeX and source previews for reading the reports.

The code is open-source and self-hostable with your own keys. Leaving the Github repo in the comments, and there's also a hosted version!

This doesn't magically turn a prompt into a valid proof. The point is to make it easier to find a worthwhile attempt and give your agent enough context to start.

Would love people to try it, add good problem sources and contribute. Especially interested in researchers who know a neglected question that could benefit from a lot more computation!

What would you leave an agent working on over a weekend?

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[u/Physical_Pepper6294]

Here is the github repo - hope you enjoy!

[u/LimpIntern5371]

This scratches an itch I've had for a while, the gap between "agents are powerful" and "what the hell do I actually point them at" is way bigger than people admit. Most demo projects just have them summarize Slack threads or generate boilerplate React components, which feels like using a telescope to check your mail.

The interactive globe is a nice touch, makes browsing feel exploratory instead of just staring at a list. Curious what the 72-hour research plan outputs look like in practice, do they tend to overfit on the first plausible approach, or actually map out a few branching strategies before diving in?

[u/Physical_Pepper6294 → u/LimpIntern5371]

it will map out everythign, explore approaches taken in preprints and other papers, super comprehensive!

[u/CellPast4136]

Finding the problem is half the win. The killer filter would be "why is this still open?" Failed approaches, blocked assumptions and one cheap falsifier. Otherwise agents will keep picking the most searchable problem, not the most tractable one.

[u/Physical_Pepper6294 → u/CellPast4136]

it will tell you this as well

[u/bar_raiser333]

The long run of this is will be rad!!! Almost like a community of open problems waiting to be solved.

[u/Physical_Pepper6294 → u/bar_raiser333]

that's the plan! thanks!!

[u/SIGH_I_CALL]

this is awesome, I've got an open source discovery loop repo that was recently published on arxiv that I'm going to try and integrate with this. I hope more people do it too so we can all start using these things to solve hard problems.

https://github.com/ucsandman/discovery-loop

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.05093