OpenAI's internal AI model just solved an 80-year-old math problem — and mathematicians verified it
- Last week, an internal OpenAI artificial intelligence model disproved the 80-year unit distance conjecture by legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul ErdQs, autonomously identifying point arrangements exceeding the previously accepted upper limit.
- The planar unit distance problem asks how many pairs of points can be positioned exactly one unit apart on a flat surface, an issue ErdQs set an upper ceiling for decades ago.
- Fields Medallist Timothy Gowers wrote he would recommend publication to Annals of Mathematics "without any hesitation," noting no previous AI-generated proof has achieved this level of sophistication.
- Mathematician Thomas Bloom and colleagues at the University of Manchester used the AI's high-dimensional technique to solve ErdQs's 50-year-old sum-product conjecture, demonstrating human-AI research collaboration.
- This breakthrough serves as a proof of concept for AI in frontier mathematics, though human researchers remain vital for digesting and improving proofs, marking a shift toward autonomous exploration of problems once accessible only to human insight.
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The problem has eluded mathematicians for 80 years. Now it has been solved – by an AI, reports DN. – I'm still a bit in shock, says Svante Linusson, professor of mathematics at KTH.
AI has solved a problem that was formulated in 1946 by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, and that mathematicians around the world have been grappling with ever since.
OpenAI's internal AI model just solved an 80-year-old math problem — and mathematicians verified it
The closest the field has come to solving the planar unit distance problem, first proposed in the 1940s, was in 1984. Now, OpenAI claims an internal model has cracked the puzzle.
Stunning AI Solution For 80-Year-Old Problem Shocks Mathematicians
Last week, OpenAI shocked the mathematical community by revealing that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found a counterexample to a famous conjecture made by legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946.
An AI of OpenAI achieved what generations of mathematicians failed to do: refute a guess of almost 80 years
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