Comment by jltsiren
1 hour ago
This paper was more about closing off research, but in an amusing way.
There are a lot of results about conditional lower bounds: "If this problem is at least this hard, that other problem must be at least that hard." But now a widely used assumption was proven wrong, and an entire house of cards collapsed.
It feels like that particular research direction is now a dead end, until we can figure out a way of proving conditional bounds that is robust against technicalities. We would like to prove something like "If this problem is essentially at least this hard, that other problem must be essentially at least that hard." If the conditional bound depends on the assumption that the first problem requires at least n^2 time but somebody comes up with an O(n^1.9992) time algorithm, a slightly weaker conditional bound would still remain.
> It feels like that particular research direction is now a dead end
This is the most negative possible take on the most positive possible kind of result in CS.
To see just how unduly negative it is, imagine how different your response would have been had the exact same result been reported in a paper by exclusively human authors. Would you have likewise accused them of creating a research "dead end"?
EDIT: Changed "by, e.g., Ryan Williams" to "by exclusively human authors". Without having checked the authors, who include Ryan's wife and frequent collaborator Virginia, I had reached for a big name in the field purely as an example of a human who might well have made this breakthrough on their own.