When you do the math, humans still rule

Have reports of AI replacing mathematicians been greatly exaggerated?

Artificial intelligence has attained an impressive series of feats — solving problems from the International Math Olympiad, conducting encyclopedic surveys of academic literature, and even finding solutions to some longstanding research questions. Yet these systems largely remain unable to match top experts in the conceptual frontiers of research math.

Now a Harvard professor and other world-renowned mathematicians have launched a grand experiment to more clearly define the boundary between artificial and human intelligence. These scholars have challenged AI companies to crack a series of tough problems that the mathematicians themselves recently have solved but kept under wraps. The effort seeks to answer a key question: Where has AI achieved mastery and where does human intelligence still reign supreme?

“This is a tricky question to answer because the capabilities of AI are improving all the time,” said Lauren Williams, Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, who recently won a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. “But, at least at the moment, AI is not so good at making a creative leap and solving problems far outside the kinds of problems that already have been solved.”

Read the full story at the Harvard Gazette.