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Math's 'Bunkbed Conjecture' Has Been Debunked

It was intuitive, even obvious. It was also wrong.

Realizing the task would require some sophisticated programming, Gladkov enlisted a friend he’d known since high school, Aleksandr Zimin, now a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gladkov, Pak and Zimin found many small-graph examples that satisfied the conjecture, but in the end, those did not reflect the more complicated, less intuitive graphs they could build when given enough vertices and edges. “I think the future of mathematics will be to accept probabilistic proofs like this,” said Doron Zeilberger, a mathematician at Rutgers University who is known for crediting his computer as a co-author on many of his papers.

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