🤖 AI cracked a math problem that stood untouched since 1946 and the scary part is how ordinary the system was.

OpenAI says its general-purpose reasoning model disproved a major conjecture from legendary mathematician Paul Erdős, solving the long-running “planar unit distance problem.”

For decades, mathematicians believed the best way to maximize one-unit distances between points was basically some variation of a square grid. The intuition looked obvious. Turns out it was wrong.

The model discovered an entirely new infinite construction that beats the old assumptions with a polynomial improv