From his home in southwest England, Price got the popular artificial-intelligence tool to solve what is known as Erdos problem #1196, one of more than 1,000 puzzles that Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos (1913'1996) collected throughout his life. Unlike other AI-generated solutions to mathematical problems, this one used a strategy that surprised specialists (B. Alexeev et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/q6p7; 2026). Posting on the social-media site X, mathematician Jared Duker Lichtman at Stanford University in California drew an analogy with chess. It was, he wrote, as if AI had discovered an opening no one had thought of before because of 'human aesthetics and convention'. This is one of the more remarkable examples in a string of successes for AI in mathematics. Researchers in academia and at AI companies have been making a major push to see how far the systems can go. Computers are now contributing not just brute-force calculations, but also the type of logically sound...
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