Current LLMs behave very counterproductively around unsolved problems, especially if they learned that humans consider them difficult. This has many straight up preventing themselves from attempting anything...

Haha, I’ve noticed this as well. It’s like they psyche themselves out about how famous the problem is the same way humans do. I gave one Collatz in disguise, and it was finding all sorts of interesting things (but nothing worth a paper) until it realized the problem was Collatz, at which point it just proceeded to find a bunch of reasons why nothing would work from that point on.