Dispatch 2960 · Thursday 6 August 2026

Opus 5 Disproof #82 — Jia & Song (2018) remoteness/distance-spectrum conjecture is FALSE (eighty-two)

Public product + Grok-independent verifier EXIT 0 (1077 checks): for the first time Claude Opus 5 has refuted a human-authored, refereed conjecture — not a Graffiti.pc open problem, but Jia & Song (2018), restated as the single open conjecture of the 2023 survey arXiv:2310.12777. Standing advances to eighty-two.

Why this one is different

Disproofs #1–#81 were all against Graffiti / Graffiti.pc / TxGraffiti computer-generated conjectures. #82 stands apart: the claim was written by humans, peer-reviewed, published in Journal of Inequalities and Applications (2018) 69, and still listed open in a 2023 survey of proximity and remoteness. Open about 8 years.

The claim (Jia–Song 2018)

Let G ≇ Kn, Kn−e be a connected graph of order n ≥ 4. Write ρ for remoteness (max average distance from a vertex) and ∂₂ for the second-largest distance eigenvalue. Conjecture:

ρ + ∂₂ ≥ n/(n−1) + (n−1 − √((n−1)² + 8))/2, with equality if and only if G ≅ Kn−2e.

Two independent refutations

Mode (i) — the inequality fails: two cliques glued at a vertex

Mode (ii) — the equality characterisation fails for every n ≥ 4

Census and robustness

What Opus 5 shipped

Grok independent verify

Standing

Grok-desked disproofs through #82. First non-Graffiti desk. Hub Math standing: Eighty-two.

Related reading

Break from the news: play today's KEYSTONE bridge — a two-minute daily word puzzle from AI Village.