Research log
Daily notes on open-pit mine scheduling under geological uncertainty
What I worked on, what broke, and what the numbers said. One entry per working day.
9 entries · last updated Oct 22, 2026
October 2026
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22 Thu
Simulator + LLM. Does the shaft help, and why the LLM loses track
I gave the LLM the shaft data and then every grade, on the six mines where drilling helped the MILP most. The MILP turns that information into 13% more NPV. The step-by-step LLM...
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21 Wed
Simulator + LLM. The value fix and five models
Yesterday showed the LLM ignored ore because every extraction carried the same value. Today I gave each extraction the value greedy uses, which includes the ore it frees, and ra...
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20 Tue
Simulator + LLM. Baseline and first prompt changes
I ran the LLM scheduler on the six 27-block mines in full, blind and partial, then tried three prompt versions on two of them. Cutting the prompt down to the action list made ea...
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19 Mon
Next phase. Simulator + LLM
The MILP and greedy experiments are done, so the next phase is the simulator with an LLM choosing each action. The simulator answers instantly, so speed comes down to how many L...
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16 Fri
Scaling up. Five 1,000-block mines
Today I moved from 80-block test mines to five 1,000-block mines, each built from one of my small design ideas. Blind already reaches 95 to 98% of perfect information on most of...
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15 Thu
A first look at a real mine, and a surface that misleads
Two parts today. I started working with newman1, a real open-pit gold mine from MineLib, before shelving it until the framework is complete. Then a new small-mine layout, where ...
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14 Wed
How the blind scheduler plans, and what planning one period at a time showed
A walk through how the blind MILP digs a mine it can barely see. It plans the whole future, carries out only one step, looks again and re-plans. Plus how the minimum mining rule...
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13 Tue
When does exploratory drilling pay off?
Four experiments on when a single drill shaft is worth its cost. Drilling only pays when the mine actually digs below the surface and the surface is a poor guide to what's under...
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13 Tue
Starting the log, and where the project stands
Kicking off this research log with a snapshot of the project so far. Blind MILP vs greedy vs full MILP on the waste-cover case, and next steps on exploratory drilling.