6h ago

A reported demonstration shows GPT-5.5 reproducing a claimed solution to the Erdős unit distance problem with a diagram titled “Impressive Reasoning Abilities of LLMs” that flags prompter assistance

Researchers note GPT-5.5 Pro matches results via parallel strategies and extra test-time compute.

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Original post

This seems interesting if it checks out. There was more than one prompt, but the level of human interaction was small. Also, GPT-5.5 was told not to do a web search. I don't know how reliably it obeys such instructions, but it seems to discover the proof rather than knowing it.

11:56 AM · May 21, 2026 View on X

it still shows impressive abilities, but diff one than those advertised for the "internal model"

(((ل()(ل() 'yoav))))👾(((ل()(ل() 'yoav))))👾@yoavgo

this is a clear demonstration of:

7:37 PM · May 21, 2026 · 10K Views
7:38 PM · May 21, 2026 · 653 Views

@littmath it might get distracted. and it requires scaffolding, which the current model supposedly did without. and it should know when to continue. these are all failure points in my experience. (also, "combine 1, 2, 5" is kinda big imo)

Daniel LittDaniel Litt@littmath

@yoavgo I think I broadly disagree; I think the hints are minimal enough that I would expect 5.5 Pro to get there with good scaffolding and lots of test-time compute, just by trying the strategies it listed in parallel.

8:08 PM · May 21, 2026 · 2.2K Views
8:12 PM · May 21, 2026 · 825 Views

@yoavgo Very clever Hans of these models!

(((ل()(ل() 'yoav))))👾(((ل()(ل() 'yoav))))👾@yoavgo

this is a clear demonstration of:

7:37 PM · May 21, 2026 · 10K Views
9:23 PM · May 21, 2026 · 216 Views

At first it felt like Perelman emerging from years of seclusion with a proof to the Poincaré conjecture. But the fact that we didn't need a model to do 125 pages of thinking somehow made the achievement seem a lot less impressive to me.

Daniel LittDaniel Litt@littmath

Pretty interesting -- ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, with pretty minimal human guidance (and apparently without web search), also finds the counterexample to unit distance.

6:32 PM · May 21, 2026 · 54.1K Views
11:27 PM · May 21, 2026 · 555 Views
A reported demonstration shows GPT-5.5 reproducing a claimed solution to the Erdős unit distance problem with a diagram titled “Impressive Reasoning Abilities of LLMs” that flags prompter assistance · Digg