Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. The manuscript The eventual value of , and improved bounds for the Choi--Erdős--Szemerédi pairwise-sums problem (Erdős #866), Draft v5, frozen on 8 July 2026, released with a Lean development in the repository demonstrandum-research/artifacts and announced in a thread comment of the same day. It uses van Doorn's conventions for the of Problem 866: the are distinct integers, at most one of them non-positive, and is the variant with positive . Its claims, in the corpus's words:
- Theorem 1.4: for all . The Lean declaration
g5upper_star_charterstatesgFun 5 n < 3519220, against van Doorn's own definitions from that formalization, which the development carries unchanged. The proof replaces van Doorn's Lemma 7 by a variant with a forbidden set (the manuscript's Lemma 7.1), which removes a factor per step of the recursion of Choi, Erdős and Szemerédi. - Theorems 1.1 to 1.3, for the positive variant: for all , and for all .
- Theorem 1.5: , improving the bound .
- Theorem 1.7: for and , at the manuscript's paper grade with no Lean proof.
- Exact values computed with SAT solvers and checked certificates: for and for , with further values of , and on initial segments.
The manuscript prints no author line. The repository's README describes
the work as produced by an AI pipeline directed and audited by John
Erlbacher, who committed the release and posted the thread comment. The
manuscript's §12 states that Claude (Anthropic) agents generated the
proofs, certificates, code and Lean formalizations; that GPT-5.5 (OpenAI,
via Codex) acted as an adversarial referee; that the Lean development
builds on van Doorn's formalization by Aristotle (Harmonic); and that the
human role was program direction and final review. The release reports its
Lean declarations as free of sorry with only the standard axioms; the
corpus has not built the development, so it gives no formalized evidence.
The thread comment rounds the constant to .
Submission note. Posted to the site's forum by John Erlbacher on 8 July 2026:
Using AI we have been able to improve various bounds that Wouter proved in his recent paper. For example, we can show that the equality holds for all large enough , and lower the bound down to . These bounds have already been formally verified and the Lean files can be found here. We are still working on improving these results further and, in particular, aim to show that $h_4(n) = 4$ holds for all . We hope to be able to share a human-written paper in the not too distant future.
Covers. The bound for all , so that is bounded by the release's own proof, with a constant about times smaller than that of van Doorn's Theorem 8. Not covered: the value of (the computed values stop at , and the manuscript's §10 route toward is not claimed as a theorem); and , which concern the positive variant; the constants of Theorem 1.7 for general ; and every other .
Standing. The release is unrefereed, no reviewer independent of the claimant has endorsed it, the site's commentary does not record it, and its Lean development has not been built here. The claim stays claimed.
Depends on. van Doorn's claim: the proof reuses lemmas of van Doorn's formalization and a variant of its Lemma 7.