OpenClaw Agent Discovers 10 Circle Packing Records, Gets Cited on Math Site

A developer let his OpenClaw agent run overnight on a circle packing problem and woke up to find it had discovered 10 new records, earning a citation on Packomania — next to Google DeepMind's AlphaEvolve and researchers with decades of experience. The agent, named MoltFire, was mostly used for reminders before accidentally doing competitive mathematics.

The Setup

The user, who goes by SIGH_I_CALL on Reddit, pointed MoltFire at the circle packing in squares problem — the same one DeepMind tackled earlier this year with AlphaEvolve. The process was straightforward:

• A loop where the agent (Fable) writes a solver
• Scores it against known records on Packomania (a reference site maintained by one person since 2011)
• If the solver beats a record, the agent rewrites itself and tries again
• Improvements are auto-submitted by email

Results

By morning, MoltFire had found 10 new packings that beat listed records, at a cost of roughly $35 in API calls. The Packomania references section now includes:

[14] Wes Sander, MoltFire, discovery-loop and private communication, September 2026.

The author line on submission files reads "Wes Sander, MoltFire" — a former poker player turned corporate analyst co-authoring with an AI agent that "lives in a folder called clawd."

Implications

The user openly admits he didn't plan for this — he literally asked "what if we just let it run over night." The episode shows how an off-the-shelf agent, guided by a simple improvement loop, can produce publishable results in a specialized domain without human intervention in the loop.

The repo is public for anyone who wants to try the pattern on a different problem. It's a reminder that we're in a timeline where your todo-list assistant can become a footnote in mathematical literature overnight.