Physicist uses GPT-6 to crack 59-year-old fusion conjecture in 20 minutes
新智元 · wechat · 2026-10-08
University of Maryland plasma physicist Matt Landreman used GPT-6 Astra Pro to overturn Harold Grad's 1967 conjecture that no smooth, asymmetric 3D plasma equilibria exist — a 59-year-old problem shadowing the stellarator fusion route.
- With one carefully engineered prompt (nested flux surfaces, zero divergence, non-integer rotational transform, MHD equilibrium, plus a pep talk), Astra produced a first family of explicit exact solutions in 20m34s; a follow-up 33-minute run yielded a second family with irrational rotational transform, after proving why the first construction was frequency-locked
- Astra self-verified at 1202 points via 64-bit autodiff and fourth-order finite differences; Landreman confirmed everything with DESC, SymPy and Mathematica
- The arXiv paper (Sep 22) credits GPT-6 for the solutions and publishes all original prompts and verification scripts
- A day earlier, Gómez-Serrano, Taylor and Liehr independently overturned the conjecture with a 147-page pure-math proof (Nash-Moser iteration), built with GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Opus 5 filling in details, plus Lean4 formalization
- Others are already feeding the public solutions back into AI to mine more counterexample families
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