[ramstar3000]

Running more scanning agents exponentially is an interesting proposition as we scale to massive, continuously growing tasks. In my initial experimentations with well-defined tasks, the overhead has not been worth diving into yet, since latency has been low enough.

It would turn a slow search into a highly parallelised "MapReduce" problem. You trade a brief, massive burst of machine execution to keep wall-clock latency incredibly low for the human waiting at the top.

A tree structure means these scanning agents don’t just run wild. High-level nodes could aggressively prune entire branches the moment a scanning agent reports a dead end.