alt Hacker NewsMy AI agents found an unmapped Maya site?
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This story is very cool, and it’s exciting to see how much progress AI will bring to every field. One thing to temper everyone from wanting to lidar the whole world is human capacity. Finding discoveries like this is essentially as hard as doing the lidar mapping. Now the issue will be getting archaeologist there in time before someone else does.
The best way to protect a site is to leave it alone. If we start finding dozens or hundreds of sites it will be more than what archaeologists can excavate and protest. Treasure hunters and looters don’t care about stratigraphy and the processes involved for doing research. Maybe the cat is out of the bag on this one, but good for thought.
Edit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people use AI to do this or that no bad actor will. This comment is in response to the sentiment I am seeing in the comments that we should lidar the whole world and have AI find any anomalous structures it can. There is no way for archeologists to excavate and protect all those places in that scenario
I created the first online lidar map of the UK (well, England and Wales), as announced here many years ago! (now at https://lidarmap.uk) and delightfully there have been dozens of finds of previously unknown sites of archaeological significance found using it that I'm aware of. Roman villas, forts, henges, all sorts of earthworks. New discoveries are being reported using this and similar tools almost weekly, on forums like https://www.reddit.com/r/LiDARdiscoveryUK/. Britain really is littered with this stuff.
Although it does feel the finds are getting increasingly hard to spot, every now and then you get a how did everyone miss that moment. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the remaining impressive finds tend to be in woodland, using the Digital Terrain Model data which can peer beneath the forest canopy, like this Mexican one today, or are within newly released coverage which is promptly pounced on by armchair archeologists.
Not sure what my point is here except... to me this story still feels like a function of the amazing recent progress in lidar coverage and data availability (not to mention the incredible technology behind it), rather than an AI one, although I don't doubt that pointing a capable model and a healthy token budget in this direction might well be able to sweep up a few of the remaining discoveries.
Interesting. I don't want to sound like a hater or anything, but I will personally wait for an expert archaeologist's verification on this. I have dealt with agents making up stuff that sounds fantastic and ground-breaking but completely falters on further review. And I doubt the folks you contacted have the audacity to question a Google engineer and his 48 agents. Even if he is not archaelogist. Do you think it would have gone the same way if it was another random person who had done the exact same thing and reached out to them? The one day feedback part also has me questioning what they actually did.
Anyway, I can hear myself beginning to sound like a hater now, so I will stop here. I hope it turns out to be right, and in that case, congrats on your wonderful discovery.
author here. Update: the site had already been discovered. It appears in a 2025 paper by Estrada-Belli, Canuto, Šprajc & Fernandez-Diaz (page 14) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105288. The agents missed it, I missed it, and it wasn't in INAH's register yet (National Institute of Anthropology and History). The rest of the story still holds, and there's still a lot left to discover with vibe-archeology. I hope this brought some extra excitement to archaeology.
Amazing, the perfect application of AI Agents. Find patterns/answers in massive amounts of data. It is becoming more clear everyday that this is the primary driver behind an AI's "intelligence". Finding the solution to mathematical problems that have decades of documented attempts by mathematicians, creating software based on exisitng code and now, discovering Maya pyramids within enourmous amounts of lidar-data.
The final barrier for super intelligence, or perhaps even just "human intelligence": can it materialize "new fields/ideas" without large datasets of human made and curated existing attempts?
"This is by far the best time ever to be alive."
I appreciate the enthusiasm. I'm not sure I agree. Especially since this was a SWE and not an archeologist / anthropologist announcing this (especially if the goal is to understand and preserve history -- not get headlines for AI).
This post turned out to be a perfect example of the blind faith in LLM agents. Their outputs are not to be trusted and must be rigorously checked.
Given that we can all see the mapped pyramid in the previously published paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X2..., the title of this seems incorrect ("finds unmapped Maya pyramid").
What kind of harness setup that would allow me to fire off a prompt, go to sleep, and wake up to see such a comprehensive and intricate infra setup (48 agents, orchestrated, image storage, continuous execution), and just say “damn”? I paid my for peasant $20 bucks a month plan and works in the CLI (Codex), I never know how to scale work on number of agents, non-interrupted workflow, or multiple models (he mentioned he consulted multiple models, I assume not just copy pasting questions in different chats). Is there a harness that I’m missing out on?
The title reads as if the 48 agents took 72 hours to find this. The text doesn't exactly say that:
> "It took less than 72 hours to go from a random thought while traveling to an official reply from the Mexican government."
> "That night, I asked the agents to analyze it and went to bed." ... "I woke up and checked the agents' reports. 'DAMN!'"
> "Me: OK, please do the report. And I went to bed."
(The actual agents-on-the-job time and compute seems much less than 48 agents * 72hours from the report.)
I think we are about to see a whole new age of "citizen scientists", enabled by AI. This particular example was solved fast with a lot of compute, but it seems that this approach would have been possible with less equipment too.
The bottleneck will be data. Every possible signal out of publicly available datasets will be squeezed fast.
Wasn't it extremely expensive to analyse so many images?
Edit: I asked gemini and it's only 834 1200x1200 images for 1,200 km2 at standard lidar resolution.
Can that be used to detect illegal mining operations in South America?
Philosophically speaking, the human quest for discovering things from past, from far away, from depths of oceans, from the depths of atoms and microcosms - has no bounds and targets. That means it will be never be completed. There will always be an unsung, unknown warrior who fought for his people, or some higher-level of intelligence and knowledge to be achieved. The insatiable quest for such awareness, knowledge and discoveries imbalance the priorities of the human progress. We are doing this at the cost of climate change, natural resources and human detachment from the nature.
> Me: OK, how do I contact INAH? How does the reporting process work?
> Agent: …instructions for the report… + email addresses
> Me: OK, please do the report.
I don't want to sound offtopic nitpicky, because the content of the article is quite cool, but I just hope the author didn't just straight up generate the report with AI and sent it right to the email address. If I were in this situation, I'd most certainly write myself something along the lines of "Hey, I'm not anyone professional but just wanted to inquire about these coordinates because it seems that this site has not been yet catalogued and it's likely to contain something interesting based on my research. Please take a look.". Or better yet, send it to some actual archelogist who would already be versed in these kind of communications, and let him handle it professionally.
At this moment probably everyone has had to deal with sudden influx of ai-generated emails, I hear about it all the time from my friends who work in customer service and such. Much has already been said on the internet about this kind of conduct, but I just think that using an AI agent to pretend you are familiar with the topic should be discouraged. Just be honest and write your own words, if the recipient needs some professional expertise from AI, they can just paste your message into their own model.
> This is by far the best time ever to be alive.
Please just stop the hype now.
I spent about an hour today exploring NASA datasets with Claude, mostly out of curiosity, inspired by this post.
It identified what appeared to be a previously unknown asteroid pair: 2018 NC15 and 2026 LD1.
Turns out the pair had already been discovered earlier this year, but that almost made the experience more interesting.
I'm a software engineer, not an astronomer. Being able to explore an entirely different field and independently arrive at an existing discovery was pretty remarkable.
Here's the writeup: https://wilkens.io/research/nea-pair-2018-nc15-2026-ld1/
With the development that this was already discovered prior, this now feels a lot like the issue where an LLM "finds" a new bug only for it to turn out that it had been discussed and disregarded years earlier.
To me, the scary thing is that an LLM typically does a good job of convincing it's handler (or others) that its (re)discovery is of significance. Whether it's of undue significance or not determines if this new wave LLM research is just creating more work for us humans, be they maintainers of projects or archeologists.
Imo should update title to that which the article currently uses:
"My AI Agents (Re)discovered a Maya Site in 72 Hours"
Seriously though, why 48 AI Agents? I'm curious, presumably one agent could parallelize its analysis so its not raw parallelism? Do the agents share work? This kind of agent scale is outside of my budget, I would love to know the details.
One thing I haven't seen research on with these agent swarms is if an equivalent amount of compute dedicated to a single agent (sequential vs parallel longer wall clock time) would lead to similar outcomes or if something around agents working in parallel with model temperatures how they are leads to more exhaustive searching and less path dependence.
You CAN just do things, but one should also temper the excitement a bit. Agents are amazing but also the last 10% is still really difficult to get right and requires subject matter expertise for most things.
As an aside: anyone with access to all those tokens for funsies can do this. Folks without that access cannot just do things. The have / have-not of tokens will be interesting to see over time.
My main question - how were those different agents coordinating and sharing data? Did you have a unified interface or did you just delegate different parts of the task to different AIs via their chat interfaces?
Oh, this is really cool. Things like this inspire me, and I believe we can figure this out using AI—without ending up with a "Skynet" scenario.
What do we gain from mapping out everything? Why is the best time to be alive one where such a nightmare becomes feasible? For anyone wondering what could possibly be bad about uncovering the entire world, turning everything into numbers and computational tasks, look at "Origins of Totalitarianism" for a start.
LIDAR data from Europe has been used to identify Celtic agricultural structures (fields) by a retired museum director. He’s also found some Roman age artifacts.
The title made me think AI crawlers discovered an old website that Autodesk forgot about.
How much does this cost though? Who can afford 48 agents working overnight? I pay $100 a month to Claude to have one agent...
You can pinpoint the location using Claude. There are several large ranches nearby, a road is ~250m from this site, though it is up a rather steep hill. Still, it would be quite mind-boggling if the site isn't known to the locals.
Google SWE is key! The fact that Google's employee can do so much creative things on the side says something about the company. I used to work there and it's definitely one thing I missed the most!
I'd very much like to see this done in the UK.
Also agents analyzing drought pictures, where many ancient UK structures seem to appear would be an easy win. I've never checked whether there's a comprehensive drought picture map of the UK.
If Elon relented and added Lidar, it's probably because of the potential of a huge roving lidar-mapping network of Tesla cars with starlink as the supporting network.
If these type of subtle finds interest you, this account is great: https://x.com/MoundLore
> This is by far the best time ever to be alive.
It's the best time for you to be alive, and for certain other people with certain resources and access to certain technologies. And for the same reasons, it is a very bad time to be alive for a vastly greater number of other people.
Cool story but:
> They turned the lidar strips (about 1,200 km² of jungle) into images, and 48 agents went through them one by one like very patient archaeologists, looking for pyramids, platforms, and plazas while filtering out natural hills, sinkholes, and roads. There was no special model or classifier involved: the agents literally looked at the pictures, following a precise guide.
Would it be better to ask a single LLM to create a processing pipeline to inject raw LIDAR data, create a heightmap and use an image classifier to identify unnatural shapes that standout and create a ranking score with a higher value where multiple shapes appears close to each other. At least you get something reusable and probably multiple order of magnitude faster.
This is neat! Might be risky depending on the region if you end up discovering a covert drug cartel production facility.
"At this point, we should probably lidar the whole planet and let the agents discover the rest"
Yes please
well done! Actual good use of AI.
That is amazing! Great discovery and write up and motivation. Earlier in the week I got an FB impression of a LIDAR for Fort Stamford (CT), superimposed with the satelite footage and pondered what other hidden constructs might be lurking around here. And all you got to set up the loop asking for it...
Discovering a village in Minecraft >>>>>>>
kinda curious on how these agents worked, was it something like a cursor session on cloud operating on downloaded data?
This is probably one of the coolest AI related news
Do West/Central Africa next?
As someone who's been gaslit by ChatGPT and Claude on more than one occasion on something being novel that simply didn't even do a google search to see that it was in fact previously patented... this is dangerous and seems to be happening far more often even as models are getting better at "grounding".
You don’t really need agents to do that. Just open up the lidar map qnd scan with your own eyes. human structure really do stand out very clearly, even at fairly low zoom.
I did it around my house and found a site I thought was interesting and later discovered it was already referenced as a former roman fort.
Saw this on X. Pretty cool. Does he get to name it?
Title update (of submission and blog post)?
My AI Agents (re)Discovered an Unmapped Maya Site
Nice!
The title is "My AI Agents Found an Unmapped Maya Site"
The site in question was found earlier: https://bsky.app/profile/indyfromspace.bsky.social/post/3n22...
The Mexican govt may not have had the right records, but you can see what the site looked like at the time it was first found here: https://bsky.app/profile/indyfromspace.bsky.social/post/3n22...