Live data from Hacker News

AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

deepmind.google

11–20 of 177 posts

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#11
“What the I.M.O. is testing is very different from what creative mathematics looks like for the vast majority of mathematicians,” he said. ---

Not to pick on this guy, but this is ridiculous goal post shifting. It's just astounding what people will hand-wave away as not requiring intelligence.

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#13

“What the I.M.O. is testing is very different from what creative mathematics looks like for the vast majority of mathematicians,” he said. --- Not to pick on this guy, but this is ridiculous goal post shifting. It's just astounding what people will hand-wave away as not requiring intelligence.

No, that sort of thing has been said about math competitions for a long time. It's not a new argument put forward as something against AI.

An analogy with software is that math competitions are like (very hard) leetcode.

There was an article posted on HN recently that is related: https://benexdict.io/p/math-team

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#14

“What the I.M.O. is testing is very different from what creative mathematics looks like for the vast majority of mathematicians,” he said. --- Not to pick on this guy, but this is ridiculous goal post shifting. It's just astounding what people will hand-wave away as not requiring intelligence.

Yeah, this would be akin to saying "What leetcode is testing is very different from what professional programming looks like".

It isn't untrue, but both are considered metrics by the community. (Whether rightfully or not seems irrelevant to ML).

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#16
post #6

Interesting that the transformer used is tiny. From the paper: "We use the Meliad library for transformer training with its base settings. The transformer has 12 layers, embedding dimension of 1,024, eight heads of attention and an inter-attention dense layer of dimension 4,096 with ReLU activation. Overall, the transformer has 151 million parameters, excluding embedding layers at its input and output heads. Our cust…

It's not tiny, this is a quite normal size outside the field of LLMs, e.g. normal-sized language models, or also translation models, or acoustic models. Some people even would call this large.

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#17

From the Nature article: > Note that the performance of GPT-4 performance on IMO problems can also be contaminated by public solutions in its training data. Doesn't anybody proofread in Nature?

Not a subject matter expert, so forgive me if the question is unintentionally obtuse, but It seems like a reasonable statement. They seem to be inferring that problems with existing public solutions wouldn't be a good indicator of performance in solving novel problems-- likely a more important evaluative measure than how fast it can replicate an answer it's already seen. Since you couldn't know if that solution was in its training data, you couldn't know if you were doing that or doing a more organic series of problem solving steps, therefore contaminating it. What's the problem with saying that?

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#18

From the Nature article: > Note that the performance of GPT-4 performance on IMO problems can also be contaminated by public solutions in its training data. Doesn't anybody proofread in Nature?

Weird. I can't find the sentence you are quoting in the paper.

Re: AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry

#19

Though this particular model doesn't sound generalizable, the neuro-symbolic approach seems very promising to me: - linking the (increasingly powerful) "system 1" tools that are most of current ML with more structured "system 2" tools, like logical proof generation, which can plan and and check the veracity / value of output. - System 2 chugs along 'till it gets stuck, then system 1 jumps in to provide an intuitive g…

> The key milestone will be moving away from the need to use specific formal / symbolic domains, and to generate a pretrained system that can generalize the skills learned from those domains.

You do not need to solve everything at once. This approach has the potential to revolution both math and programming by moving formal verification from being a niche tool into a regular part of every practitioners toolbox.

It also completely solves (within the domain it applies) one of the most fundamental problems of AI that the current round is calling "hallucinations"; however that solution only works because we have a non AI system to prove correctness.

At a high level, this approach is not really that new. Biochem has been using AI to help find candidate molecules, which are then verified by physical experimentation.

Combinatorical game AI has been using the AI as an input to old fasion monte carlo searches

Post reply on HN