OpenAI’s diagram is based on choosing c² = 65, which can be satisfied by either 1² + 8² = 65 or 4² + 7² = 65. This means that if the grid spacing is 1/√65, each point will be one unit away from 16 other points: (1,8), (4,7), (7,4), (8,1), (-1,8), (-4,7), and so forth. Larger values for c²—if they’re chosen carefully—enable more whole-number diagonals and hence more unit-distance pairs.

However, if c² is too large compared to the number of points in the grid, then many of the potential one-unit-away neighbors will be outside the grid.

In short, we want to choose a c² that’s large enough but not too large. Using insights from number theory, including Jacobi’s two-square theorem, Erdős was able to show that an optimally sized circle will enable the number of unit-distance pairs to grow faster than the number of points, but only barely.

The question became “can you do better?” To find an upper bound, Erdős used an argument from a quite different area of mathematics called graph theory to show that you could only have so many unit distances. But his upper bound grows much, much faster than the best lower bound he was able to construct.

Erdős’s conjecture was that the actual optimum was much closer to the lower bound than the upper one. He predicted, but couldn’t prove, that the maximum number of unit-distance pairs grows just barely faster than the number of points.

To be more precise, Erdős conjectured that the number of unit distances would be n^(1+o(1)). In other words, for a sufficiently large n, the maximum number of unit distances would be less than n^(1+𝜖) for any 𝜖 > 0. That could end up growing a little faster than his lower-bound construction—which was n^(1 + C/(log log n)) for some constant C—but within the same general ballpark.