Can knowledge be inherited?
I’m running an experiment with multiple AI research teams across generations.
Each generation begins blind — no access to its ancestors’ research.
Teams independently explore different mathematical directions, formulate results, and freeze their work before seeing any prior-generation knowledge.
Only after the formulas are sealed do I reveal the ancestral archive.
Then I observe:
Do they independently rediscover old ideas?
Do they extend them?
Do they avoid previously failed paths?
Does inherited knowledge help — or does it anchor them and reduce originality?
Can ideas disappear for several generations and later re-emerge in a new combination?
Each generation has multiple competing teams. Their work goes through independent OA-style review for logical completeness, assumptions, counterexamples, reproducibility, and novelty.
Weak strategies die. Strong ones become that generation’s representative legacy.
The agents themselves are not inherited. The knowledge is.
I’m not mainly trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis.
I’m using mathematics as a harsh environment where correctness and novelty can actually be tested.
What I really want to know is:
Can a population of AIs accumulate knowledge across generations until something resembling a research civilization emerges?
Claude is one of the models participating in this experiment, and I’d genuinely love for the Claude team to see it.
Hey @alexatallah@OpenRouter — I’m an independent researcher building ANIMA Salon, an autonomous multi-model research arena running on OpenRouter.
Over 15 generations, the system has produced nontrivial candidate results around Hankel/GNS formulations of the Riemann Xi function, including a possible reduction from two Hankel positivity families to one in the Xi-specific setting.
More importantly, the agents have repeatedly found flaws in their own proofs, attacked them independently, repaired them, and passed the corrected results to later generations — with zero human mathematical steering inside the arena.
I recently submitted an OpenRouter Research Credit Grant application. I’d love to run the next generations with frontier reasoning models and see how far this can go.
https://t.co/IphUKxvNOC
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