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Solving a Million-Step LLM Task with Zero Errors (2025)
Elliot Meyerson
, Giuseppe Paolo, Roberto Dailey,
Hormoz Shahrzad
,
Olivier Francon
, Conor F. Hayes,
Xin Qiu
,
Babak Hodjat
,
Risto Miikkulainen
LLMs have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in reasoning, insights, and tool use, but chaining these abilities into extended processes at the scale of those routinely executed by humans, organizations, and societies has remained out of reach. The models have a persistent error rate that prevents scale-up: for instance, recent experiments in the Towers of Hanoi benchmark domain showed that the process inevitably becomes derailed after at most a few hundred steps. Thus, although LLM research is often still benchmarked on tasks with relatively few dependent logical steps, there is increasing attention on the ability (or inability) of LLMs to perform long range tasks. This paper describes MAKER, the first system that successfully solves a task with over one million LLM steps with zero errors, and, in principle, scales far beyond this level. The approach relies on an extreme decomposition of a task into subtasks, each of which can be tackled by focused microagents. The high level of modularity resulting from the decomposition allows error correction to be applied at each step through an efficient multi-agent voting scheme. This combination of extreme decomposition and error correction makes scaling possible. Thus, the results suggest that instead of relying on continual improvement of current LLMs, massively decomposed agentic processes (MDAPs) may provide a way to efficiently solve problems at the level of organizations and societies.
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Citation:
arXiv:2511.09030
, 2025.
Bibtex:
@article{meyerson:arxiv25, title={Solving a Million-Step LLM Task with Zero Errors}, author={Elliot Meyerson and Giuseppe Paolo and Roberto Dailey and Hormoz Shahrzad and Olivier Francon and Conor F. Hayes and Xin Qiu and Babak Hodjat and Risto Miikkulainen}, journal={arXiv:2511.09030}, month={ }, url="http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?meyerson:arxiv25", year={2025} }
People
Olivier Francon
Collaborator
olivier francon [at] cognizant com
Babak Hodjat
Collaborator
babak [at] cognizant com
Elliot Meyerson
Ph.D. Alumni
ekm [at] cs utexas edu
Risto Miikkulainen
Faculty
risto [at] cs utexas edu
Xin Qiu
Collaborator
xin qiu [at] cognizant com
Hormoz Shahrzad
Ph.D. Student
hormoz [at] cs utexas edu
Areas of Interest
Game Playing
Other Areas