Over the past week, we have seen separate AI solve a number of previously unsolved Erdős problems. Paul Erdős was a famous Hungarian mathematician who was well known for his wide-ranging interest in a large number of mathematical fields, and his travels across the world, where he would just turn up on the doorsteps of other mathematicians and help them. (There is a great biography of Erdős called “The Man who loved Numbers” by Paul Hoffman). Throughout his life, he would come up with problems that he posed to the mathematical community, and many of these have remained unsolved.
Last week, OpenAI announced that they had solved an 80-year-old problem set by Erdős using one of their latest models. A few days later, Google (not to be outdone) announced that one of their AI models had solved previously unsolved nine Erdős problems. All these solutions have been checked and verified by human mathematicians. This reason this is important is that we now seeing instance where AIs are producing original solutions to problems that have never been solved before.