FQxI Physics

Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids. An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better. This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.

I've gotten a lot of comments like this, so forgive me if this isn't very kind, but I'm at my limit. If you're a serious academic, you've spent a lot of time looking at citations, and you know they often contain errors. You know that it's very common for professors just to copy citations they found in other papers and put them into their own papers because they need a lot of citations to look credible. Given that this is going on, it's kind of silly to think that we should have a kind of death penalty for having an LLM, hallucination mistake What you're doing is virtue signaling and pretending that citations are somehow sacred to what academics do, when in fact they're mostly just poorly put up window dressing. You're being dishonest. Perhaps with yourself, perhaps with me.