Eight decades after Paul Erdős posed the unit distance problem in 1946, a general-purpose AI has produced configurations that beat the long-standing conjectured bounds, proving at least n^(1+δ) unit-distance pairs for some δ>0. Mathematicians at Princeton have verified the result, with figures like Tim Gowers and Arul Shankar calling it a significant advance. An 80-year-old […]An AI Cracks an 80-Year-Old Geometry Puzzle. What Do Mathematicians Make of It?
Eight decades after Paul Erdős posed the unit distance problem in 1946, a general-purpose AI has produced configurations that beat the long-standing conjectured bounds, proving at least n^(1+δ) unit-distance pairs for some δ>0. Mathematicians at Princeton have verified the result, with figures like Tim Gowers and Arul Shankar calling it a significant advance. An 80-year-old […]