Donald Knuth's 'Claude's Cycles': When AI Solved a Problem the Father of CS Couldn't
TL;DR Donald Knuth — the 87-year-old creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming — published a paper called “Claude’s Cycles” after Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 solved an open graph theory problem he’d been stuck on for weeks. The AI found a working construction in 31 guided explorations over about an hour. Knuth then wrote the formal proof himself. His opening words: “Shock! Shock!” The paper pulled 635,000 views in hours and reignited the debate about what AI can actually contribute to mathematics. ...