Tarif

A breakthrough by OpenAI in a very famous Combinatorics problem, the Planar Unit Distance problem by Erdos 1946. The problem is amazing because it can be described to a first-grader: Find a way to place n points on the plane to maximize the number of pairs that have distance exactly 1. For example, if you have n=4 points on a square (of side-length 1) you have 4 pairs of distance 1. The diagonals have length sqrt(2) so don't count. But you can squeeze one diagonal and create a point-set with n=4 points and 5 pairs of distance 1. And you can't get more than 5 pairs from n=4 points, so we are done with n=4 points. Now, if you place n points on a line, you have n-1 pairs of distance 1. In general, all known constructions of n points had a number of pairs scaling essentially linearly: n^{1+something vanishing} It seems that the model found a way to place n points on the plane so that their unit distances scale super-linearly: like n^{1+delta} for some *constant* delta. Delta was not explicitly specified apparently, but a forthcoming refinement by Will Sawin shows delta=0.014 works, according to the announcement. This is incredible progress for mathematics, since this is (unlike previous Erdos problems solved by AI) a major breakthrough, in one of the most studied problems in combinatorial geometry. If you're in mathematics research now, you feel the AGI. Lijie Chen said it honestly in the video: "It's very hard to sleep, man"