Autonomous disproofs of the Erdős unit distance conjecture with GPT-5.5 Pro
OpenAI's disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture marks a milestone in AI for mathematical research. However, the result relied on an internal model with undisclosed test-time compute, hindering independent reproduction and analysis by the community. Here we present a simple autonomous agent built on the publicly available GPT-5.5 Pro. The agent uses a problem-agnostic three-stage prompting pipeline: brainstorm, execute, and review. We ran eight independent trials with web search disabled. In each trial, the agent produced a correct or essentially correct disproof of the conjecture. The resulting proofs are diverse and do not merely reproduce earlier AI-generated proofs. Since GPT-5.5 Pro was released nearly a month before OpenAI published its disproof, our evaluation is free from data contamination. The system operates efficiently, using an average of 106.7 k reasoning tokens per trial. We release our code and all outputs, providing a publicly accessible AI agent to resolve this conjecture autonomously.
Authors
- Yichen Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8496-9251)
Institutions
- College of the Canyons (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2026-10-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2621541123
- Primary Topic
- Artificial Intelligence Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- DeepMind
- OpenAI