Comment by red75prime
2 days ago
Sure, we can write a procedure that recognizes some formal grammar, which intersects with the natural language. Defining the formal grammar that fully captures the current natural language understanding of the mathematical community is a bit harder.
This problem was even worse: it's matched by the formal grammar, but the naïve formalisation has a trivial answer, so it is clearly not what was intended.
That clearly may be doing some heavy lifting. It is assumed that trivial answer wasn’t what was intended for the problem, but unless someone asked Erdos, I don’t think we know.
Considering that he did some work towards the problem, tackling non-trivial cases, I think we do know. There's no way he wouldn't have perceived trivial solutions at some point.