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Dinitz-Garg-Goemans Conjecture

For single-source unsplittable flow, every fractional flow can be rounded to an unsplittable flow whose cost is no higher than the fractional cost, while each arc's load is exceeded by at most the maximum demand. (The cost version of Goemans' unsplittable-flow conjecture.)

Result
Disproved
Field
Combinatorial Optimization
Posed by
Yefim Dinitz, Naveen Garg, Michel Goemans
Year posed
1999
Years open
27y
Solved
2026-07-22
Model
GPT-5.6 Pro
Vendor
OpenAI
Collaborators
Dmitry Rybin
Verification
Pending peer review
Notability
No dedicated article

What the AI did

Rybin used GPT-5.6 Pro to search for and construct an explicit counterexample: a graph whose fractional flow cost is 58, while every unsplittable flow with capacity violation at most 15 costs at least 60 - so no cost-preserving rounding exists.

Verification

Announced on X by Dmitry Rybin (2026-07-22) with a shared GPT-5.6 Pro chat. The counterexample is a concrete finite graph checkable by direct computation (fractional cost 58 vs. minimum unsplittable cost 60 under capacity violation <= 15), but it is not yet peer-reviewed or formally verified. Not to be confused with the separate 'Dinitz conjecture' on Latin-square colourings.

Source

Dmitry Rybin (X)