Last March, Iowa State University mathematicians Leslie Hogben and Carolyn Reinhart received a welcome surprise. Adam Wagner, a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, emailed to let them know he’d answered a question they’d published the week before — though not by any of the usual math or brute-force computing techniques. Instead, he used a game-playing machine.
“I was very happy to have the question answered. I was excited that Adam had done it with AI,” said Hogben.
Hogben and Reinhart’s problem was one of four that Wagner solved using artificial intelligence. And while AI has contributed to mathematics before, Wagner’s use of it was unconventional: He turned the hunt for solutions to Hogben and Reinhart’s question into a kind of contest, using an approach other researchers have applied with great success to popular strategy games like chess.
“I just saw all these articles about these companies like DeepMind, for example, that have created these programs that can play chess, Go, and Atari games at really superhuman levels,” Wagner said. “I thought, how nice would it be if you could somehow use these self-learning algorithms, these reinforcement learning algorithms, and find a way to use them in mathematics as well?”
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