Wow! How neat is this?! Congrats to the OpenAI team...
A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It.
The math world is losing its mind over the new solution to an Erdős problem. This is what AI found, how we missed it-and why it matters.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-solves-erdos-problem-openai-c4029e84?mod=hp_lead_pos9
tl;dr
One of OpenAI's AI models solved a famous mathematics problem posed by Paul Erdős: the unit distance problem.
The unit distance problem asks: if you place n points on a plane, what is the maximum number of pairs of points that can be exactly one unit apart? Erdős showed that arranging the points in a grid produces a very large number of such pairs and conjectured that no arrangement could do substantially better. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians largely tried to prove that intuition correct. Instead, OpenAI's AI model found a surprising counterexample, a different arrangement that exceeds the bound implied by Erdős's conjecture. The result is significant not only because it solves a longstanding open problem, but because it does so using connections between different areas of mathematics that human researchers had largely overlooked, demonstrating that AI may now be capable of generating genuinely novel mathematical insights.
The broader implication is that AI may now be capable of contributing original research in advanced mathematics, potentially accelerating discovery across science. Leading mathematicians increasingly believe that humans will struggle to compete with AI on certain types of mathematical problem-solving, although AI is not yet exhibiting the level of creative genius associated with the greatest historical breakthroughs.
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Kara K.W. Byun
Head of Fintech
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