DeepMind and AI Lead to Mathematical Breakthrough

In brief:

 Scientists have used AI to suggest and prove new mathematical theorems for the first time. The potential breakthrough came in a collaboration between mathematicians who specialise in pure mathematics at the universities of Oxford and Sydney, alongside Google-owned DeepMind. Their work examined knot theory and representation theory, areas of "pure mathematics" which typically depend on human intuition for breakthroughs. In a paper first published in the journal Nature, researchers have explained how DeepMind was also able to uncover patterns and connections in the advanced mathematical fields of knot theory and representation theory. Mathematicians at the University of Oxford used AI to discover a surprising connection between algebraic and geometric invariant knots, establishing a completely new theorem in the field. What sets DeepMind’s work apart, is its detection of the existence of patterns in mathematics with supervised learning — and giving insight into these patterns with attribution techniques from AI.

Why this is important:

  This is the latest in a series of breakthroughs for DeepMind, which has repeatedly been able to crack problems that require analysing an enormous amount of data and computation, such as learning how to play computer games better than humans can, or figuring out how proteins can be folded.