The Second Computational Chomp Challenge of Ekhad and Zeilberger
Ekhad and Zeilberger's second computational Chomp challenge asks for a Chomp position with three winning opening moves. Answered by exhibiting a bar with three winning opening moves.
- Result
- Proved
- Status
- Candidate (review pending)
- AI contribution
- AI-discovered
- Method
- Computation
- Field
- Combinatorial game theory
- Posed by
- Shalosh B. Ekhad and Doron Zeilberger
- Year posed
- —
- Years open
- —
- Solved
- 2026-08-11
- Model
- Claude
- Vendor
- Anthropic
- Collaborators
- Jaideep Sai Padhi
- Verification
- Unreviewed
- Publication
- Preprint
- Significance
- 12 / 100
- Disclosed cost
- —
- Wikipedia
- No dedicated article
What the AI did
The paper's division of labour, in its own words: the model "generated the mathematical ideas, the proofs, and the verification code", while the author "selected the problems and determined when a line of attack should be abandoned; executed all computations, on hardware the system could not access; designed and enforced the verification protocol". It adds that neither role was passive: the system did not merely formalise ideas supplied to it, and the author did not merely execute instructions.
Verification
Checked by this site on 21 August 2026 against the paper (arXiv:2608.11290v2): the division of labour is verbatim as quoted, all five challenges are reported fully solved, and two further problems are reported only partial and are NOT entered here. The paper states a four-principle verification protocol that distinguishes proved, machine-verified and supported claims, and ships code and verification scripts. Those scripts were not re-run here. Days-old preprint, no independent review.