Quanta: Why the Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI — and r/singularity Asks Whether the Curve Is Actually Exponential
Quanta Magazine published 'Why the Legendary Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI' on 2026-08-03, tracing an acceleration that started in late 2025 with literature-review tooling and formalization systems and moved to autonomous provers in early 2026. It follows OpenAI's August 1 claim that an internal build of Astra resolved or substantially advanced 10 open problems across eight fields — high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, arithmetic circuit complexity, group theory, operator algebras, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography, extremal combinatorics — with machine-checkable proofs on GitHub, including Erdős problems 183 and 180/146 and a disproof of Connes's rigidity conjecture. r/singularity picked up the trend question directly (126 upvotes / 52 comments). The falsifiable part is the proof artifacts: unlike benchmark scores, formal proofs either check or they don't.
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