The Unique Games Conjecture – Proved (!!?) | Dana Moshkovitz, UT Computer Science
UT Austin Computer Science YouTube 23,620 views as of 13 November 2026
Why it is here
Recording of Dana Moshkovitz’s public lecture at UT Austin on 4 Nov 2026 about OpenAI’s claimed proof of Khot’s Unique Games Conjecture (importance-5 entry). It runs 3 h 02 min, so it was not sent to Gemini (owner’s rule for videos over an hour); this note is written by hand from Scott Aaronson’s post of 10 Nov and the video’s YouTube metadata.
Description
Uploaded by UT Austin Computer Science on 10 Nov 2026 (length 10,913 s; 21,188 views on 12 Nov). Scott Aaronson announced it on Shtetl-Optimized the same day (“Dana’s talk on OpenAI’s proof of the Unique Games Conjecture, now on YouTube!”, https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10318). His summary of what the talk covers: “what the Unique Games problem is and why people cared about it, the structure of a proof of its NP-hardness, exactly where the previous attempts to complete the proof (based on the Long Code and the Hadamard Code) got stuck, the new tree-based code that the AI discovered, and how the new code gets around the Long Code and Hadamard Code’s limitations. She doesn’t get to the soundness analysis.”
Status of the proof as of 12 Nov: no verification verdict. Aaronson: “Experts are of course hard at work on more formal writeups of the proof (which will hopefully be more comprehensible than the AI’s writeup).” In the comments he adds that Moshkovitz is still reconstructing the proof (“it’s only been a month!”).