> that an AI or collection of agents could “invent things” simply by virtue of trying essentially everything in a reasonable bound and stumbling into a solution

on a surface level a human solving an (unsolved) math problem can look like this, and of course the tree of all possible symbols you can send to a proving assistant is much wider than what the human samples, and the same goes true for an LLM in a proving loop. It isn't "truly random", it can't possibly be (and solve the problem). Both humans and LLMs solving unsolved math problems are aggressively pruning mathematical syntax and logical strategy trees.