Announcement: Talk by Prof. Siddhartha Gadgil
Title: Automating Mathematics?
Timing: 4th September, 9:00-10:30 am Venue: Old Physics Building G-01
Abstract:
Starting with just the rules of chess, it took four hours of playing against itself for AlphaZero, a computer program, to become the strongest chess player on the planet, playing with a "dynamic, open style" and preferring moves that are "risky and aggressive". With a couple of days of self-play, AlphaZero discovered the best standard openings, and even discarded a few of them.
Could computers similarly acquire all the major capabilities used by Mathematicians and the Mathematics community in the discovery and proof of Mathematical results and concepts? The use of computers for experimentation and computations while doing mathematics has become routine, and computers have also begun to provide rigorous proofs of special classes of results, presumably beyond human capabilities. Further, interactive proof systems allow the verification of results in collaboration with mathematicians.
We shall sketch some of the ways in which computers are increasingly being used in producing mathematical proofs. We discuss some experiments using these.
It is however in other cognitive domains, such as board games, visual and linguistic tasks etc. that computers show superhuman capabilities, including of a nature that were believed to be especially difficult for machines. We discuss some of these successes, what is behind them, and what this suggests for the future of computers in mathematics.
We also discuss some examples where Artificial intelligence has been used in mathematics, often in conjunction with algorithmic methods.
