Hundreds of computer science papers rest on a conjecture that an internal OpenAI model now claims to have refuted, the company said on Monday. OpenAI announced two more results the same day, one in mathematics and one in physics.

In a blog post , OpenAI said the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) has been “widely believed to be true”. The conjecture concerns how hard it is to solve Boolean satisfiability, a problem closely tied to P versus NP. Researchers have used it to show that problems in graph theory, computational biology, databases and other fields are hard to solve quickly.

According to OpenAI, its model found the disproof on 16 October. The company checked it in Lean, a language that verifies proofs by machine, the next day. It has published the model’s write-up and the Lean proof on GitHub.

The scientists who proposed ETH will examine it

A group led by Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi of UC San Diego and Ryan Williams of MIT will check and explain the result.…