Paul Erdos, who published more than 1,500 papers during his lifetime, also left a legacy of more than 1,000 open research questions, some of which are now being solved with AI. Credit: George Csicsery The company has not revealed all the precise details and steps of how it did this, nor the name of the AI system that achieved the result, which it has published on its website. However, the finding has been verified independently by mathematicians not connected to the firm. OpenAI announced on 20 May that its chatbot software had disproved Paul Erdos (1913'1996) on what is called the unit-distance problem. In 1946, Erdos worked out what he suggested was the best arrangement of points on a plane so that as many pairs as possible are at a given distance from each other ' and he put down a challenge: no one could do better. Now, OpenAI says that its system has done precisely that. It did so by using techniques in algebraic number theory, which enabled it to choose points with coordinates...
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