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On September 11, 2026, MIT professor Dor Minzer received messages suggesting his team had solved the "unique games" conjecture, a famous open question in theoretical computer science. While rumors circulated that OpenAI had discovered the proof, Minzer and his graduate students Yumou Fei and Shuo Wang were actually working on a closely related problem. They rushed to publish a 95-page paper three days later to avoid being overshadowed by an AI announcement, prioritizing mathematical completeness over clarity.
On October 6, OpenAI announced a proof of the unique games conjecture alongside 376 other results. Researchers reacted with alarm and curiosity regarding the AI’s capabilities. In contrast, Ryan O’Donnell of Carnegie Mellon University praised Minzer’s work as "another truly great one," noting that his team had made significant progress on similar constraint satisfaction problems involving graphs and node coloring.
Minzer and his colleagues proved a variant of Khot’s second conjecture regarding the "2-to-1 games problem." This involves finding solutions where constraints are looser, allowing for two possible colors per edge instead of one. Their work built on a seven-year effort that began in 2018, utilizing error-correcting codes to bridge gaps between different mathematical problems.
Source: Quanta Magazine • Ben Brubaker • October 7, 2026