An AI Cracks an 80-Year-Old Geometry Puzzle. What Do Mathematicians Make of It? – Bitcoin News
The post An AI Cracks an 80-Year-Old Geometry Puzzle. What Do Mathematicians Make of It? – Bitcoin News appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Key Takeaways OpenAI solved Paul Erdős’ 1946 puzzle with n^(1+δ) unit-distance constructions. Princeton verified the result, giving AI a 2026 credibility boost in mathematics. Tim Gowers says the advance could influence cryptography and proofs beyond geometry. An 80-year-old geometry riddle finally budged when an OpenAI system stitched together an unlikely construction that beat long-standing expectations. The unit distance problem, posed by Paul Erdős in 1946, asks how many pairs of points exactly one unit apart can exist among n points in the plane; the AI found configurations that grow faster than the classic playbook allowed. Princeton mathematicians checked the work, and heavyweights like Tim Gowers and Arul Shankar took notice. Beyond bragging rights, the result hints at a new kind of collaborator for math, one that uses general inference to