AI Disproves 27-Year Computer Science Hypothesis
Original: An AI Breakthrough Has Made Decades of Computer Science Research ‘Irrelevant’
Why This Matters
Disproving ETH would reshape algorithm design and complexity theory at their foundations.
OpenAI and Anthropic both claim to have disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH), invalidating decades of complexity theory research. Proofs published on GitHub in natural language and machine-checkable Lean format; independent verification underway.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic announced this week that their AI systems have disproved the exponential time hypothesis (ETH), a 27-year-old foundational assumption in theoretical computer science holding that the effort required to solve certain problems scales exponentially with problem size. The claim, if verified, would render vast bodies of research on complexity theory and algorithm design either pointless or in need of revision.
The fallout is already personal. Linköping University professor Peter Jonsson has work being presented in two weeks at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. As of Monday, he says much of it is 'dead.' UC Santa Barbara professor Daniel Lokshtanov, one of the original proposers of ETH, estimates the result would make him 'galactically wrong' and affect around 50 of his published papers. 'It's just a giant bomb dropped into the middle of the field,' he told WIRED.
Both firms published their proofs on GitHub in natural language and Lean format. OpenAI has enlisted the original ETH authors plus an MIT researcher to coordinate community verification, including a Google form for volunteers and a commitment to fund a dedicated conference.
Not everyone is despairing. Thore Husfeldt, head of algorithms research at the IT University of Copenhagen and an early formulator of a version of ETH, called it a 'once-in-a-generation result' and a 'fantastic' development. 'It's like somebody just illuminated an entire subfield in floodlights of knowledge,' he said, describing researchers as 'overexcited bunnies' eager to explore newly visible territory.