Google's DeepMind announces “first AI” that can solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems

Google ’s AI unit Google DeepMind recently unveiled a pair of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that achieved silver-medal standard in solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems. The AI models demonstrated advances in solving complex mathematical problems, one of the key frontiers of generative AI development.

“We’re presenting the first AI to solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems at a silver medalist level. It combines AlphaProof , a new breakthrough model for formal reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2 , an improved version of our previous system,” Google DeepMind said.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) with advanced mathematical reasoning is seen as the future because it has the potential to unlock new frontiers in science and technology. However, current AI systems still struggle with solving general math problems because of limitations in reasoning skills and training data.

Google AI unit said that together AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 systems solved four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving the same score as a silver medalist in the competition for the first time.

Each year, elite pre-college mathematicians train, sometimes for thousands of hours, to solve six exceptionally difficult problems in algebra, combinatorics, geometry and number theory.

How Google DeepMind achieved IMO success
AI models have struggled with abstract math and need greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. It added that one question was solved within minutes but others took up to three days, longer than the competition’s time limit.

“First, the problems were manually translated into formal mathematical language for our systems to understand. In the official competition, students submit answers in two sessions of 4.5 hours each. Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others,” Google Deepmind said.

The company said it created AlphaProof, a system focused on reasoning, by combining a version of Gemini , the language model behind its chatbot of the same name, with AlphaZero , another AI system which previously bested humans in board games such as chess and Go.

“AlphaProof solved two algebra problems and one number theory problem by determining the answer and proving it was correct. This included the hardest problem in the competition, solved by only five contestants at this year’s IMO. AlphaGeometry 2 proved the geometry problem, while the two combinatorics problems remained unsolved,” it added.