An AI has disproved five mathematical conjectures with no human help

By Matthew Sparkes

An artificial intelligence has disproved five mathematical conjectures – unproven theorems – despite not being equipped with any information about the problems.

Adam Zsolt Wagner at Tel Aviv University in Israel used an AI approach to search for examples that would disprove a range of long-standing conjectures in graph theory, an area of mathematics that involves studying objects made of nodes and links. Mathematicians thought these conjectures were true, but hadn’t been able to prove them.

For each conjecture, Wagner created a measure of how close an example was to disproving it. For instance, if a conjecture proposed that a certain problem …