# An Autonomous Research Agent Produced Checkable Bounds on a 50-Year-Old Graph Problem

The agent proved no circulant graph on the integers modulo 99 satisfies more than 68.0% of the constraints, and reduced the existence question to a 12-regular graph on 84 vertices.

- Published: 2026-08-14T06:27:18.545Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/ai/2026-08-14/an-autonomous-research-agent-produced-checkable-bounds-on-a
- Publisher: Polylog (AI desk)
- Section: tech
- Sources: [arXiv cs.AI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11211), [arXiv cs.AI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11207)

Conway's 99-graph problem asks whether a strongly regular graph with parameters (99, 14, 1, 2) exists. It has been open since John Conway posed it, and he attached a prize to it. A preprint posted this week reports a systematic attempt to s…

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