Problems / Multi-agent and harness, medium

Research agents share few browsers

A deep-research system fans out to 5 subagents that each browse the web; the browser pool has 16 browsers.

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Your goals

Success ≥ 95% of tasks, p99 ≤ 90 s.

Test cases

Like a coding problem, a solution has to pass every case, not just the one it was built for. Submit in the lab runs all 5; 2 of them are hidden until then.

  1. As given. The problem’s own traffic, scheduled failures and seed.
  2. Peak hour. 25% more traffic than the problem states, with the same failures.
  3. A server dies. One replica of the service with the most replicas is killed for part of the run.

The traffic

2 requests a second for 45 seconds: 100% task (writes).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls Agent API.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
Agent APIApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Agent orchestrator.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 500 slots · timeout 180 s
Agent orchestratorAgent orchestratorAgent API calls it.Calls Subagent pool.An agent loops: think, call a tool, read the result, repeat until done.400 slots · 1 steps
Subagent poolSubagent poolAgent orchestrator calls it.Calls Browser tool.Multi-agent research systems fan a task out to parallel subagents and use many times more tokens than a single agent.400 slots · 5 steps
Browser toolBrowser toolSubagent pool calls it.Browser tools let agents read and act on web pages, which is slow and brittle.16 slots

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