[
    {
        "id": "osp-20228",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "title": "Coding Agents for Coding Theory",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Yeung",
                "given": "Abraham"
            }
        ],
        "URL": "https://omanscience.com/ar/articles/coding-agents-for-coding-theory",
        "language": "en",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    2026
                ]
            ]
        },
        "abstract": "We spent five weeks using an LLM coding agent on open problems in coding theory: finding large sets of four-letter words, such as DNA barcodes, that stay far apart in edit distance. The agent wrote the verifiers and search code; a human chose the problem and set the verification protocol. Restricting the search to codes with a prescribed symmetry, a classical technique, shrank the problem about fourfold and raised the best known code of length 6 and minimum edit distance 3 from 114 to 120 words ($E_4(6,3) \\geq 120$). The same pipeline improved twelve further lower bounds at lengths 6 to 9 and distances 3 to 6. We give the failures equal space. Our own search stopped at 116 and recorded the last symmetry class as topping out at 112; a second agent session, running the same search with a better operator, found the 120. A later verdict that the method did not carry over to length 7 was wrong for the same reason, and an earlier instance cost three weeks. Each time, an intermediate result was written down, never rechecked, and treated as a fact that ruled out further search. Checking final outputs, as our protocol required, does not catch such errors."
    }
]