> I think this was all already figured out in 1986 though

They cite that paper in the third paragraph...

  Naively, the n-gluon scattering amplitude involves order n! terms. Famously, for the special case of MHV (maximally helicity violating) tree amplitudes, Parke and Taylor [11] gave a simple and beautiful, closed-form, single-term expression for all n.

It also seems to be a main talking point.

I think this is a prime example of where it is easy to think something is solved when looking at things from a high level but making an erroneous conclusion due to lack of domain expertise. Classic "Reviewer 2" move. Though I'm not a domain expert and so if there was no novelty over Parke and Taylor I'm pretty sure this will get thrashed in review.

It bears repeating that modern LLMs are incredibly capable, and relentless, at solving problems that have a verification test suite. It seems like this problem did (at least for some finite subset of n)!

This result, by itself, does not generalize to open-ended problems, though, whether in business or in research in general. Discovering the specification to build is often the majority of the battle. LLMs aren't bad at this, per se, but they're nowhere near as reliably groundbreaking as they are on verifiable problems.

> But no one has been able to greatly reduce the complexity of these expressions, providing much simpler forms.

Slightly OT, but wasn't this supposed to be largely solved with amplituhedrons?

That paper from the 80s (which is cited in the new one) is about "MHV amplitudes" with two negative-helicity gluons, so "double-minus amplitudes". The main significance of this new paper is to point out that "single-minus amplitudes" which had previously been thought to vanish are actually nontrivial. Moreover, GPT-5.2 Pro computed a simple formula for the single-minus amplitudes that is the analogue of the Parke-Taylor formula for the double-minus "MHV" amplitudes.

You should probably email the authors if you think that's true. I highly doubt they didn't do a literature search first though...

Still pretty awesome though, if you ask me.

I'm not sure if GPTs ability goes beyond a formal math package's in this regard or its just its just way more convienient to ask ChatGPT rather than using these software.