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Why mathematics is set to be revolutionized by AI

Cheap data and the absence of coincidences make maths an ideal testing ground for AI-assisted discovery — but only humans will be able to tell good conjectures from bad ones.
  1. Thomas Fink

    1. Thomas Fink is the director of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, UK.

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Giving birth to a conjecture — a proposition that is suspected to be true, but needs definitive proof — can feel to a mathematician like a moment of divine inspiration. Mathematical conjectures are not merely educated guesses. Formulating them requires a combination of genius, intuition and experience. Even a mathematician can struggle to explain their own discovery process. Yet, counter-intuitively, I think that this is the realm in which machine intelligence will initially be most transformative.

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Nature 629, 505 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01413-w

References

  1. He, Y.-H., Lee, K.-H., Oliver, T. & Pozdnyakov, A. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.10140 (2024).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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