If you’re looking to rub elbows with the who’s who of mathematics before they hit the big time, look no further than the International Math Olympiad (IMO).
Each year since 1959, high school math students from more than 100 countries have competed to solve a wide variety of math problems involving algebra, geometry, and number theory quickly and elegantly. Many IMO winners have secured prestigious math awards as adults, including the coveted Fields Medal.
In essence, IMO is a benchmark for students to see if they have what it takes to succeed in the field of mathematics. Now, artificial intelligence has aced the test—well, the geometry part at least.
In a paper published this January in Nature, a team of scientists from Google’s DeepMind have introduced a new AI called AlphaGeometry that’s capable of passing the geometry section of the International Math Olympiad without relying on human examples.
“We’ve made a lot of progress with models like ChatGPT … but when it comes to mathematical problems, these [large language models] essentially score zero,” Thang Luong, Ph.D., a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and a senior author of the AlphaGeometry paper, tells Popular Mechanics. “When you ask [math] questions, the model will give you what looks like an answer, but [it actually] doesn’t make sense.”
For example, things get messy when AI tries to solve an algebraic word problem or a combinatorics problem that asks it to find the number of permutations (or versions) of a number sequence.
To answer math questions of this caliber, AlphaGeometry relies on a combination of symbolic AI—which Luong describes as being precise but slow—and a neural network more similar to large language models (LLMs) that is responsible for the quick, creative side of problem-solving.
Yet, math experts aren’t convinced that an AI made to solve high school-level math problems is ready to take off the training wheels and tackle more difficult subjects, e.g. advanced number theory or combinatorics, let alone boundary-pushing math research.
To read more, click here.