Forbidden Sidon subsets of perfect difference sets, featuring a human-assisted proof

We resolve a $1,000 Erdős prize problem, complete with formal verification generated by a large language model. In over a dozen papers, beginning in 1976 and spanning two decades, Paul Erdős repeatedly posed one of his "favorite" conjectures: every finite Sidon set can be extended to a finite perfect difference set. We establish that {1, 2, 4, 8, 13} is a counterexample to this conjecture. During the preparation of this paper, we found that although this problem was presumed to be open for half a century, Marshall Hall, Jr. published a different counterexample three decades before Erdős first posed the problem. With a healthy skepticism of this apparent oversight, and out of an abundance of caution, we used ChatGPT to vibe prove both Hall's and our counterexamples in Lean.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2026-05-22
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2531760123
Primary Topic
Limits and Structures in Graph Theory
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Forbidden Sidon subsets of perfect difference sets, featuring a human-assisted proof

Dustin G. Mixon, Boris V. Alexeev
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Limits and Structures in Graph Theory
article

Forbidden Sidon subsets of perfect difference sets, featuring a human-assisted proof

Dustin G. Mixon, Boris V. Alexeev
article en

Abstract

We resolve a $1,000 Erdős prize problem, complete with formal verification generated by a large language model. In over a dozen papers, beginning in 1976 and spanning two decades, Paul Erdős repeatedly posed one of his "favorite" conjectures: every finite Sidon set can be extended to a finite perfect difference set. We establish that {1, 2, 4, 8, 13} is a counterexample to this conjecture. During the preparation of this paper, we found that although this problem was presumed to be open for half a century, Marshall Hall, Jr. published a different counterexample three decades before Erdős first posed the problem. With a healthy skepticism of this apparent oversight, and out of an abundance of caution, we used ChatGPT to vibe prove both Hall's and our counterexamples in Lean.

Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesVol. 123(21)
The Ohio State University (US)
National Science Foundation
Openalex Percentile: Top 96%
Limits and Structures in Graph Theory
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