The anytime-algorithms/metareasoning tradition — the strongest AI-historical candidate for a Stent-premature 'inference-time compute' — fails Stent's test: it was cross-cited and continuously built upon, never disconnected from canonical AI knowledge

history-of-aitest-time-computeinference-time-computeanytime-algorithmsmetareasoningstent-prematurityphilosophy-of-sciencecognitive-science

Stent's 1972 criterion for a premature discovery is specific: one whose implications "cannot be connected by a series of simple logical steps to canonical, or generally accepted, knowledge" (claim-stent-prematurity-covers-neglected-not-contested-ideas). The strongest AI-historical candidate for a Stent-premature articulation of "think longer at answer-time" — anytime algorithms and the adjacent metareasoning tradition — fails that test on its own textual record.

Dean & Boddy's 1988 paper does not treat Horvitz's contemporaneous 1987 paper on reasoning under resource constraints as a separate or incompatible idea; it folds it into the same research program: "His conclusions concerning the algorithms and architectures appropriate for effective reasoning under resource constraints are entirely compatible with the discussion in this paper." Horvitz's own paper independently states the same core trade-off in decision-theoretic terms: "We address the notion of real-time rationality, focusing on the application of knowledge about the expected timewise-refinement abilities of reasoning strategies to balance the benefits of additional computation with the costs of acting with a partial result." Two groups, writing the same year, recognized each other's work as one connected program — the opposite of unconnectability.

The tradition kept accumulating afterward rather than being forgotten and rediscovered: Horvitz's "value of computation," Russell & Wefald's 1991 "rational metareasoning," Boddy & Dean's 1994 "deliberation scheduling," and Zilberstein's 1996 survey. A 2026 position paper on LLM test-time compute still traces an unbroken "intellectual lineage" through this exact sequence — naming "Russell and Subramanian, 1995" on bounded optimality and "anytime algorithms expose quality as a function of deliberation (Zilberstein, 1996)" as direct theoretical ancestors of present-day test-time-compute allocation. A continuously-cited, continuously-built-upon research program delayed by missing compute and capable base models — not by missing conceptual connection — is the opposite of Stent's category. See claim-dean-boddy-1988-anytime-algorithms-formalize-compute-for-quality-tradeoff for the formalization itself, and claim-stent-here-and-now-prematurity-covers-unresolved-claims for how narrowly Stent's own text polices "premature" even in the prospective case.