Yes, and I think this point and the post you're replying to are the central fact of this story, which the OP should acknowledge.

My own attempts to use agents to develop new historical knowledge [1] point to this as being both a very promising and interesting domain, but also one where the agents reliably and repeatedly make claims of novelty that are based on having read ~80% of existing research. Obviously to make an actual well-grounded claim of novelty you basically need to approach 100%.

This is partly why math is so tractable for this sort of thing - mathematics papers tend to be publicly available and searchable, whereas for history, it might be the case that you have an agent swarm duplicating a find that some French person in the 1870s previously reported in an obscure undigitized book.

[1] Detailed more here: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/using-opus-55-to-discover-...