Just now, Google‘s artificial intelligence (AI) showed that it can solve math problems just like some of the brightest young mathematicians in the world. The company’s AI systems AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 participated in the challenging International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and performed well enough to get a silver medal.
Key points
The IMO is one of the toughest mathematics competitions for high school students. It has been taking place since 1959 and is known for being really hard. A lot of famous mathematicians start their careers with this contest.
Google’s AI solved four questions correctly out of six in this year’s IMO. This is just as good as winning a silver medal at an actual competition. The AI got full marks on all questions it cracked including one which only five human competitors solved.
Google therefore created two special AIs for this purpose. AlphaProof is good at general mathematics reasoning and proving its answers are correct. On the other hand, AlphaGeometry 2, that constitutes an improvement based on an earlier system, can solve geometric problems exceptionally well.
These AI systems work differently. AlphaProof uses the same process as when computers learn chess playing techniques. It involves solving millions of math problems by practicing until success becomes evident to it. AlphaGeometry 2 employs both traditional mathematical skills and Artificial Intelligence in addressing geometry questions.
The AI was given the problems in a specialized mathematical language unlike humans who are given nine hours to solve all their problems. However, different solving times were employed by the AI ranging from minutes to three days depending on specific difficulties encountered during each problem sets completion.
Mathematics experts including Fields Medal winners (like Nobel Prizes for Mathematics) checked the work done by Google’s A.I . They were amazed that it did so well particularly on excessively difficult ones.
The fact that the program can come up with a non-obvious construction like this is very impressive, and well beyond what I thought was state of the art.
Prof Sir Timothy Gowers,
IMO gold medalist and Fields Medal winner
This achievement is exciting because it shows AI can handle complex math reasoning.This could eventually help mathematicians solve harder problems more quickly or even find new things in maths and science.
Google is still working on making its AI even better at math. They are also testing systems that can understand mathematics problems which are not represented in the special mathematical language but rather in normal human languages such as English.
This news shows that AI is getting smarter in areas that require deep thinking and problem-solving, not just in tasks like recognizing images or translating languages.
