Erdős Problem #686

Partial progress by Adenwalla, Stijn Cambie, Wouter van Doorn, Vjekoslav Kovač, Miklos, Nat Sothanaphan, Quanyu Tang, Terence Tao, vilc and Malek Zribi with AlphaProof, Claude, Gemini Deep Think, GPT-5.2 Thinking, GPT-5.4 Thinking and Seed 2.0 Pro (9 Aug 2025): various partial results.

Problem
Erdős problem #686 (number theory); current status: open
Credit
Adenwalla, Stijn Cambie, Wouter van Doorn, Vjekoslav Kovač, Miklos, Nat Sothanaphan, Quanyu Tang, Terence Tao, vilc and Malek Zribi with AlphaProof, Claude, Gemini Deep Think, GPT-5.2 Thinking, GPT-5.4 Thinking and Seed 2.0 Pro · AI working with humans
Checked
Listed in Tao's wiki
Timeline
First AI contribution 2025-08-09 · wiki data as of 2026-06-30
Sources
Problem page (erdosproblems.com)Tao's AI-contributions wiki
PARTIALPer Tao's AI-contributions wiki

The problem

Can every integer N≥2N\geq 2 be written as

N=∏1≤i≤k(m+i)∏1≤i≤k(n+i)N=\frac{\prod_{1\leq i\leq k}(m+i)}{\prod_{1\leq i\leq k}(n+i)}

for some k≥2k\geq 2 and m≥n+km\geq n+k?

Statement quoted from erdosproblems.com/686, maintained by Thomas Bloom. Original source: [Er79d]. Current status there: open.

AI contributions

As recorded in Terence Tao's wiki AI contributions to Erdős problems (data as of 30 Jun 2026). 🟢 full, 🟡 partial, ⚪ unverified, 🔴 incorrect.

Date Kind AI systems Humans Outcome
9 Aug, 2025-15 Mar, 2026 AI working with humans AlphaProof, Claude, Gemini Deep Think, GPT-5.2 Thinking, GPT-5.4 Thinking, Seed 2.0 Pro Adenwalla, Stijn Cambie, Wouter van Doorn, Vjekoslav Kovač, Miklos, Nat Sothanaphan, Quanyu Tang, Terence Tao, vilc, Malek Zribi 🟡 Various partial results

Caveats

The wiki's classifications are provisional and are not a benchmark. Many Erdős problems have never had a thorough literature review, so a result that looks new may later turn out to be known; some problems were also stated ambiguously or incorrectly. See the problem page for the full discussion.

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