>> The cryptographic algorithm that the AI comes up with isn't guaranteed to be based on a provably NP-hard problem, so there aren't any formal guarantees. The

>> The cryptographic algorithm that the AI comes up with isn't guaranteed to be based on a provably NP-hard problem, so there aren't any formal guarantees. There are no cryptographic schemes, either in theory or in practice, that reduce to NP-hard problems. Instead, they rely on different "cryptographic hardness assumption" including factoring (and related number-theoretic problems) and a variety of so-called "lattice" problems. Are these assumptions as sure as P!=NP? No, they are explicitly stronger. Are they better cryptosystems than this work generates? Almost surely. In you are interested, there are actually some negative results that suggest it would be impossible to do cryptography based on NP-hardness alone. Akavia, Goldreich, Goldwasser, Moshkovitz show this for a restricted class of NP-hard problems in a 2006 paper [http://people.csail.mit.edu/akavia/AGGM.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/akavia/AGGM.pdf]. More philosophically, there is a big difference between computational hardness and cryptography: in complexity, we study worst-case hardness, but in cryptography, we need breaking a cipher (for example) to be hard with very high probability. Rather surprisingly, there seems to be a big difference between these two goals.