Originally published in nature, July 25, 2024.
AlphaProof showed its prowess on questions from this year’s Mathematical Olympiad — a step in the race to create substantial proofs with artificial intelligence.
After beating humans at everything from the game of Go to strategy board games, Google DeepMind now says it is on the verge of besting the world’s top school students at solving mathematics problems.
The London-based machine-learning company announced on 25 July that its artificial intelligence (AI) systems had solved four of the six problems that were given to school pupils at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in Bath, UK, this month. The AI produced rigorous, step-by-step proofs that were marked by two leading mathematicians and earned a score of 28 out of 42 — just one point shy of the gold-medal range.
“It’s clearly a very substantial advance,” says Joseph Myers, a mathematician based in Cambridge, UK, who — with Fields Medal winner Tim Gowers — vetted the solutions and who had helped to select the original problems for this year’s IMO.
DeepMind and other companies are in a race to build machines that can generate proofs to solve substantial research questions in maths. Problems set at the IMO — the world’s premier competition for young mathematicians — have become a benchmark for progress towards that goal, and have come to be seen as a “grand challenge” for machine learning, the company says.
“This is the first time any AI system has been able to achieve medal-level performance,” said Pushmeet Kohli, vice-president of AI for science at DeepMind, in a briefing to reporters. “This is a key milestone in the journey of building advanced theorem provers.”
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