AI cracked an Erdős math problem. Now experts want guardrails

The model disproved a famous conjecture, raising questions about trust, credit and access

An animations of moving a circle around a plane of dots to include as many dot pairs as possible

Paul Erdős thought that the best way to arrange as many pairs of points as possible at the same distance from each other would be to use a regular grid, with the points spaced so that as many as possible fall onto circles. As you add more points, the number of pairs will increase, but only slightly, he conjectured. An AI model found a more complicated way to arrange pairs of points so that their number actually grows at a larger rate.

Kai Williams

Think about placing dots on a flat surface.