By Dan Milmo,Ian Sample
Publication Date: 2026-05-21 16:24:00
OpenAI has announced another advance in AI thinking after its technology successfully solved an 80-year-old math problem.
The company behind ChatGPT said it had made a breakthrough with a challenge first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946: the planar unit distance problem.
The question posed by Erdős is easy to explain. If you take a piece of paper and add some dots, how many pairs can be the same distance apart? Erdős suggested that the number would increase only slightly faster than the number of points themselves.
OpenAI’s model reached a different conclusion, relying on different branches of mathematics to uncover a family of arrangements that push the limit in Erdős’ conjecture.
“For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed that the best possible solutions looked something like square grids,” OpenAI wrote on
While the work was exciting…
