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.
Authors
- Dustin G. Mixon (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2743-7010)
- Boris V. Alexeev
Institutions
- The Ohio State University (US)
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
Funders
- National Science Foundation