Stuck Downloading the Same Paper

A multi-agent research team was asked for the difference, in seconds, between X-ray time-profile measurement spans reported in two papers on fast radio bursts. The team correctly identified the first paper (arxiv:2103.07786) but then needed to pull a specific numeric measurement out of a diagram inside the PDF. Rather than finding another way to extract or estimate that figure, the WebSurfer and FileSurfer agents repeated the same download-and-search pattern many times over and the conversation ended with no numerical answer at all.

The data genuinely wasn't accessible with the available tools, a real contributing factor, since the figure lived inside a diagram rather than as parseable text, but this doesn't fully explain the failure: the team never tried an alternative approach (asking a human, estimating from surrounding text, or flagging the specific limitation) before running out of turns.

Miscommunication about which paper was the correct second source, considered as a secondary issue, since the July 2020 paper was never pinned down with confidence, but the more decisive failure was what happened even before that: repeated identical attempts to open and re-search the first paper's PDF.

Perseveration (repeating an unproductive action instead of adjusting course), most consistent with the trace: the team cycled through the same downloads and searches without ever escalating to a different strategy once it became clear the direct approach wasn't working, and the conversation simply ran out of steps mid-loop.

A team that returns no answer is more honest than one that guesses, but it's still a failure worth understanding, the actual defect wasn't a lack of capability, it was a lack of a rule for noticing "this exact approach has already failed twice" and trying something else. A workable safeguard for any agent system is a hard cap on identical retries paired with a required fallback step, like surfacing the blocker to a human, once that cap is hit.

Cap identical retries and require a fallback, such as surfacing the blocker to a human.

Retry caps; fallback steps; coordinator checks that approaches vary.