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Divergent strategies and convergent outcomes in autonomous materials discovery

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 21, 2026 · UTC

Scientific agents are mostly evaluated on whether they complete tasks or recover known results; we instead study variation across repeated open-ended campaigns. Sixteen separately initialized sessions of one model-harness configuration received a frozen database of 12,499 metal-organic frameworks, a methane-storage objective, a pinned protocol and a one-week budget. Strategies diverged into four approaches spanning 100--5,000 screened structures, and eight built 2,253 hypothetical structures. Yet the agents recovered the same materials frontier near 200 cm^3/cm^3, and an independent calculatio

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-23T09:51:33.063Z. This is not the publication date.