AI helped produce two proofs for the same cryptography problem

Last Thursday Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student Seyoon Ragavan sent a new quantum cryptography proof to his friend Yao-Ting Lin, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lin could not look at it right away, though. He was in a meeting with his adviser, U.C.S.B. professor Prabhanjan Ananth, where he heard about another proof of the same result. After the meeting, he e-mailed back to Ragavan, “We are definitely living in strange times.” That day the researchers submitted two preprint papers to arXiv.org. One was by Ragavan. The other was by Ananth and University of California, Los Angeles, professor Amit Sahai.…