SuperDataScience Podcast with Jon Krohn | AlphaGeometry: AI is Suddenly as Capable as the Brightest Math Minds

Hosted by Jon Krohn | Google DeepMind’s open-sourced AlphaGeometry blends “fast thinking” (like intuition) with “slow thinking” (like careful, conscious reasoning) to enable a big leap forward in A.I. capability and match human Math Olympiad gold medalists on geometry problems.

KEY CONTEXT
• A couple weeks ago, DeepMind published on AlphaGeometry in the prestigious journal peer-reviewed Nature.
• DeepMind focused on geometry due to its demand for high-level reasoning and logical deduction, posing a unique challenge that traditional ML models struggle with.

MASSIVE RESULTS
• AlphaGeometry tackled 30 International Mathematical Olympiad problems, solving 25. This outperforms human Olympiad bronze and silver medalists’ averages (who solved 19.3 and 22.9, respectively) and closely rivals gold medalists (who solved 25.9).
• This new system crushes the previous state-of-the-art A.I., which solved only 10 out of 30 problems.
• Beyond solving problems, AlphaGeometry also generates understandable proofs, making A.I.-generated solutions more accessible to humans.

HOW?
• AlphaGeometry uses a new method of generating synthetic theorems and proofs, simulating 100 million unique examples to overcome the limitations of (expensive, laborious) human-generated proofs.
• It combines a neural (deep learning) language model for intuitive guesswork with a symbolic deduction engine for logical problem-solving, mirroring “fast” and “slow thinking” processes akin to human cognition (per Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” book).

IMPACT
• A.I. that can “think fast and slow” like AlphaGeometry could generalize across mathematical fields and potentially other scientific disciplines, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and problem-solving capabilities.