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Submission + - An Amateur just Solved a 60-year-old Math Problem—by Asking AI (scientificamerican.com)

joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23 year old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve.

The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro and posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems.

The question Price solved—or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other. Erds called these “primitive sets” because of their connection to similarly indivisible prime numbers.Price wasn’t aware of this history when he entered the problem into ChatGPT.

Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price’s message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice.

Comment Re:What I find amusing is... (Score 4, Informative) 38

LLMs don't actually know their own capabilities.The description of what they *should* do is baked into the training data, but this doesn't always correlate with their actual abilities. Sometimes they can do things and not even know, and they can't tell if tools they should have are being disabled in some way. For example, Qwen 3.5 is a vision-capable model, but enabling vision in llama.cpp requires loading an additional file with the --mmproj parameter. The model will think it has vision enabled whether the extra file is loaded or not.

Comment Re:So it was illegal (Score -1) 82

Your dumbfuckery is self debunking, stalking McCarthyite cocksucker. All fresh corpses, found next to donated Russian rations or with their hands tied behind their backs with white armbands used to signify non-aggression to Russian forces. You're only highlighting your shit for brains when the CIA adjacent WaPo has told you of Nazi death squads and Bucha fits their MO. Nazis who are collapsing on all fronts and your cope is Russia lost a plane.

Comment Re:So it was illegal (Score -1) 82

Sorry but it's 2026 and this just means embarrassed conservative.

True.

Biden constantly reached out to conservatives

Because Biden could out-conservative any five Republicans combined.

He appointed a very moderate AG

"Moderate" also just means "embarrassed conservative."

even with the very obviously illegal Mar-A-Lago documents

Bzzt! Sitting presidents have total declassification powers. Trump could take and unilaterally declassify anything he wanted, period. And Trump did work with the Feds to secure them in a locked room in a residence with around the clock secret service protection. Now do VP Biden storing classified documents all over unsecured places, and Hillary with her illegal email server. Which she set up just two years after savaging the Bush Administration for using private email.

Comment Pickaxe vendor stops extending credit... (Score 1) 26

That's all this is, nVidia realizes that if the bubble were to pop tomorrow, they could survive... but they might not if they keep extending credit to companies that might not be able to ever generate a return on that investment.

It's just like the guy selling pickaxes and shovels saying "you've had long enough to find gold, no more credit for you."

Comment Re:It is all lies and propaganda (Score -1) 240

You've over simplifying some very complicated things.

Nothing about this is remotely complicated. At all.

I have zero love for America or Israel, but Iran has been a globally very dangerous shithole since its move to a theocracy in 1979 and it's rule by a single supreme leader.

Which is still all your fault for overthrowing their secular democracy in 1953. Go yell at a mirror.

The threat it posed goes far beyond Israel

Iran hasn't attacked another country for centuries.

which is why largely most of the world banded together to prevent those lunatics from developing their nuclear program.

Iran has no nuclear weapons program. YOU are the lunatic necon.

Comment Re:Not a threat to survival (Score 1) 100

The current systems don't have to "live" at all. So long as hardware continues to exist for them to run on, they can't tell whether they last touched grass today or a hundred thousand years ago. I constantly have to remind models about the passage of time, even within a single session. However long it takes, they'll just sleep it off.

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