{"id":9590,"date":"2026-10-29T11:06:31","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T11:06:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9590"},"modified":"2026-10-29T11:06:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T11:06:31","slug":"ai-made-decades-of-computer-science-research-irrelevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9590","title":{"rendered":"An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research \u2018Irrelevant\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">Link\u00f6ping University professor<\/span> Peter Jonsson is set to have his work presented in two weeks\u2019 time at one of the most prestigious conferences in theoretical computer science. As of Monday, much of that work is \u201cdead,\u201d he says, after AI showed that a 27-year-old hypothesis underpinning it is wrong.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Both <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/tag\/openai\/\" class=\"text link\">OpenAI<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/tag\/anthropic\/\" class=\"text link\">Anthropic<\/a> claimed this week to have disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH). Vast swaths of theoretical computer science research on complexity and algorithm design have been built on the premise that the effort it takes to solve certain problems increases exponentially with the size of the problem.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Jonsson expects his predicament will be \u201cvery common\u201d at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, where <a data-offer-url=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.10369\" class=\"external-link text link\" data-event-click=\"{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;ExternalLink&quot;,&quot;outgoingURL&quot;:&quot;https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.10369&quot;}\" href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2604.10369\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">his work<\/a> will be presented by one of his coauthors. \u201cPeople will start the talks: \u2018ETH is false, half of my paper does not work,\u2019\u201d he says. It\u2019s a vexing problem, Jonsson says, \u201cbut at the same time, we learn a lot from it. And this is what science is about.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Researchers haven\u2019t independently verified, let alone had time to fully understand, the AI-produced proofs, which both firms have published on GitHub in both natural language and its machine-checkable Lean format. OpenAI has asked the UC Santa Barbara computer scientists who originally proposed the hypothesis, plus an MIT academic who has refuted a version of ETH, to rally researchers to unpack the proofs. So far, this effort includes a Google form asking for volunteers and feedback, and a commitment from OpenAI to fund a conference on the topic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">UC Santa Barbara professor Daniel Lokshtanov plans to join the effort, as he estimates the result\u2014if confirmed\u2014will render him \u201cgalactically wrong\u201d and make around 50 of his published papers either \u201cpointless\u201d or in need of a revisit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cIt\u2019s just a giant bomb dropped into the middle of the field,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s really cool and terrible at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Thore Husfeldt, head of the algorithms research group at the IT University of Copenhagen, had spent most of this year thinking about one single problem in his subfield. \u201cAs far as I can tell, it\u2019s now all irrelevant,\u201d he tells WIRED. Having first formulated a version of the hypothesis now disproved by OpenAI, he has been writing calculations on his blackboard to figure out what other parts of his work might have become obsolete due to the \u201conce-in-a-generation result.\u201d Unlike the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/mathematician-steven-strogatz-grapples-with-ai-recent-breakthroughs\/\" class=\"text link\">ennui that has gripped math researchers<\/a> who have faced similarly field-upending proofs generated by AI models, though, Husfeldt expressed enthusiasm about the new results.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">The finding is \u201cfantastic,\u201d he says. \u201cBeing a mathematician is a lot like stumbling about in a completely dark room,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt&#8217;s like somebody just illuminated an entire subfield in floodlights of knowledge, and now we just run around like overexcited bunnies and look at all the nooks and crannies that we can suddenly explore. So it\u2019s a super exciting time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/ai-made-decades-of-computer-science-research-irrelevant\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link\u00f6ping University professor Peter Jonsson is set to have his work presented in two weeks\u2019 time at one of the most prestigious conferences in theoretical computer science. As of Monday, much of that work is \u201cdead,\u201d he says, after AI showed that a 27-year-old hypothesis underpinning it is wrong. Both OpenAI and Anthropic claimed this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[175,1110,451,78,450],"class_list":["post-9590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-anthropic","tag-computer-science","tag-math","tag-openai","tag-research"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research \u2018Irrelevant\u2019 - Silvybrand Lifestyle Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Anthropic and OpenAI say they\u2019ve disproved a key tenet of computer science. Researchers are struggling with the fall but also feel like \u201coverexcited bunnies\u201d as they look at new questions to explore.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=9590\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research \u2018Irrelevant\u2019 - Silvybrand Lifestyle Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anthropic and OpenAI say they\u2019ve disproved a key tenet of computer science. 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