Theme

Targeting root-node problems

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Welcome to December 18, 2025 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

A stated strategy of aiming capability at a handful of bottleneck problems — fusion, superconductors, batteries, quantum error correction, weather — on the theory that solving them unlocks everything downstream.

Development timeline

Newest reporting dates first. Reporting dates may differ from event dates.

2026-09-20: Edison and FutureHouse propose biological challenge problems

2026-09-20: DOE offers funding for fault-tolerant quantum computing

2026-08-12: A half-century search effectively proves matter made almost entirely of gluons

2026-07-20: A conjecture open since 1939 is disproved by explicit counterexample

2026-07-15: A model disproves a statistical procedure cited 130,000 times

2026-07-11: A fifty-year-old conjecture falls to 64 subagents in under an hour

2026-06-28: An Erdős problem falls and holds across 180,000 lines of formal proof

2026-06-26: Astronomers catch the first signature of a black hole's event horizon

2026-06-25: A leading physicist credits a model with generalizing a calculation

2026-06-17: A national agency moves to require quantum-safe cryptography

2026-05-28: Eight AI-authored papers appear on arXiv, five already accepted

2026-05-24: Nine more Erdős problems are resolved at a few hundred dollars apiece

2026-05-21: A general-purpose model disproves Erdős's unit distance conjecture

2026-05-03: An AI-generated proof is adapted to crack a 60-year-old conjecture

2026-03-24: A conjecture from 2019 is settled and its author approves

2026-03-18: A model solves two open problems, improving on published results

2026-03-13: AlphaEvolve sets new lower bounds for five Ramsey numbers

2026-03-12: Epoch investigates an apparent solution to an open problem

2026-03-05: A model cracks Knuth's Hamiltonian-cycle conjecture

2026-03-03: Gauss formalizes a Fields Medal proof and finds two errors in it

2026-02-19: Scaling laws are derived from the statistics of language itself

2026-02-17: A 45-nucleotide polymerase self-replicates in ice

2026-02-16: A model conjectures a gluon formula and then proves it

2026-02-15: A framework argues countless discoveries are bottlenecked on physics

2026-02-06: A prover settles an open research conjecture unaided

2026-02-05: Lifespan heritability is found above 50%

2026-01-26: Cross-domain skill correlates almost as tightly as within-domain

2026-01-26: A dataset curates a thousand open problems

2026-01-14: Harmonic aims $295M at the Millennium problems

2026-01-11: APOE mutations account for 92% of Alzheimer's risk

2026-01-08: A model exactly solves an open physics problem

2025-12-26: ARC Prize declares its own benchmarks saturated

2025-12-26: DeepMind targets problems where AI can skip a decade

2025-12-23: Neural networks solve the Kohn-Sham equation directly

2025-12-21: A former DeepMind director bets $10,000 on solving Navier-Stokes

2025-12-18: Hassabis names the root-node problems DeepMind is targeting

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Targeting root-node problems
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: unknown
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/themes/root-node-problems
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to December 18, 2025 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-december-18-2025
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

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