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Did ChatGPT just solve an arcane math problem that’s foiled mathematicians for over sixty years? Some leading experts say yes, Scientific American reports.
Earlier this month, 23-year-old Liam Price shared a solution to one of the so-called Erdős problems, a series of famously abstruse math conjectures left behind by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. While some of these conjectures have gotten the better of savants in the field, Price, who has no advanced math degree, seemingly stumbled on a solution for one of them by simply prompting GPT-5.4 for an answer.
While many AI-generated Erdős solutions have turned out to be a bust, experts who viewed Price’s response — which was posted to erdosproblems.com — say it’s the real deal.
“This one is a bit different because people did look at it, and the humans that looked at it just collectively made a slight wrong turn at move one,” Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has become a prominent voice adjudicating on AI’s tackling of math problems, told SciAm.
Tao said that “there was kind of a standard sequence of moves that everyone who worked on the problem previously started by doing,” but the AI took an unexpected approach by using a well-known formula that no one had thought to apply to this type of question, per SciAm.
Tao maintains a database of all the Erdős problems AI has helped “solve,” but in most cases the AI simply dredged up an existing solution that hadn’t been well known, or provided a proof that turned out not to be quite right.
But this latest breakthrough could be an example of an AI truly “thinking” outside the box, overcoming the flawed hivemind that human math wizzes had fallen into.
Still, it required humans to apply the finishing touches.
“The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Jared Lichtman, a mathematician at Stanford University whose doctoral thesis centered on one Erdős’s conjectures, told SciAm.
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