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Let be the smallest such that can be coloured with colours so that every four-term arithmetic progression must contain at least three distinct colours. Estimate .
Source: erdosproblems.com/160
No claim settles this problem.
Open. The site's label is OPEN (page last edited 2 December 2025). Its commentary records the upper bounds , from a MathOverflow answer, and (an exponent of about , which the site credits to Hunter's comment and the preprint of Shi and Dong below credits to the coloring of Deng, Tidor and Zhao, arXiv:2307.06914), and the lower bound for some , which follows from Hunter's observation together with the bounds on sets without three-term progressions in [BlSi23] and [KeMe23]. The same observation applied to Raghavan's bound [Ra26] gives , a derivation posted as a comment on the problem's thread on 4 August 2026; as a thread post it has no claim page. Two partial claims on the site's proof-claims tab (as of 2026-10-06), neither adopted by the site, claim to lower the upper exponent: Itabe's bound (credited to GPT-5.6, with a Lean development that is unbuilt and unaudited here) and Shi and Dong's bound (arXiv:2607.20752, credited to GPT 5.6 Sol). Both are claimed and unreviewed; neither determines the order of , so the problem stays open.