Unbounded hardness conjecture for unknot diagrams
Let be an integer and let be the -crossing diagram of the unknot. A diagram of the unknot has crossings if . Unbounded hardness conjecture. For every integer , there exists a diagram of the unknot with crossings such that every sequence of Reidemeister moves from to passes through a diagram with at least crossings. Equivalently, the number of extra crossings required to untangle unknot diagrams is unbounded. The conjecture is folklore; the context notes that the hardest previously known examples had only been verified to require at least three extra crossings.
References
Primary source
Corentin Lunel, Arnaud de Mesmay and Jonathan Spreer, “Hard diagrams of split links”, arXiv:2412.03372 (2026).
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