This is WILD!
Milk Road AI Twitter · Milk Road AI (@MilkRoadAI) · 2026-05-21
An OpenAI model solved the planar unit distance problem — an open mathematical question posed by Paul Erdős in 1946 that resisted 80 years of human effort — with the method of solution described as more surprising than the result itself.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-mathematical-reasoningopenaiformal-theorem-proving
Claims
- An OpenAI model solved the planar unit distance problem first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.
- The problem had gone unsolved despite 80 years of human mathematical effort.
- The method the AI used to solve the problem is described as more surprising than the fact that it solved it.
Key quotes
An OpenAI model just did something that 80 years of human mathematical effort could not and the way it did it is more surprising than the fact that it did it at all.