Original: Simon Willison · 03/03/2026
Summary
Donald Knuth expresses excitement over the resolution of an open problem he was working on, solved by Anthropic’s AI model, highlighting advances in AI and problem-solving.Key Insights
“What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.” — Donald Knuth reflecting on the resolution of his conjecture.
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3rd March 2026 Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. — Donald Knuth, Claude’s CyclesRelated Articles
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Originally published at https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/3/donald-knuth/#atom-everything.