Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by e_joules on Monday August 08, 2022 @02:41PM
(#32389293)
See, this is a case where they went for the bombastic headline and in the process hid away a really cool achievement.
So basically they created some sort of general purpose math library, that can automatically detect the type of problem, find the correct library to solve it, and input the right inputs to get the right output. That is all very impressive and would be a great product actually, if refined.
No need for the bullshit headline.
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by radford-neal on Monday August 08, 2022 @03:00PM
(#32389532)
Yes, it could be useful, if seen as a natural language front-end to a symbolic math package.
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by buescher on Monday August 08, 2022 @04:08PM
(#32390402)
That's been done - Wolfram Alpha.
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by JadeNB on Monday August 08, 2022 @04:37PM
(#32390689)
The fact that it's been done is no reason not to do it again. Even if two implementations were somehow a bad thing, Wolfram Alpha is the closedest of closed source, and replacing it with something auditable is a win for science.
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by buescher on Monday August 08, 2022 @05:11PM
(#32391062)
Sure, but nobody in academia is going to get anywhere describing their work as writing a replacement for Excel, right?
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by JadeNB on Monday August 08, 2022 @10:57PM
(#32393806)
I'm certain that, if someone came up with a workable replacement for Excel, then it would have a market in academia. (Would it earn the creator promotions? I think clickbait-y titles are more likely, not less, to get promotions.) I base this largely on the success of TeX in the hard sciences, which, by and large, won't touch Word unless absolutely forced to do so. (At least, that's how it is in math.) This is rather ahistorical, since TeX actually predates Word, but I still believe it.
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by riku_iki on Monday August 08, 2022 @04:28PM
(#32390594)
> So basically they created some sort of general purpose math library, that can automatically detect the type of problem
they likely trained language model on bunch of stack overflow questions or something similar.
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by psyklic on Monday August 08, 2022 @02:23PM
(#32389083)
The paper states it is "incapable of solving ... questions with solutions that require proofs."
Re:Solving and explaining university math problems with Deep...
by radford-neal on Monday August 08, 2022 @02:25PM
(#32389113)
Then they shouldn't apply it to questions that require proofs, and then claim that the system solves them when it doesn't.
Take the first example in Figure 4: "Find the derivative of the function using the definition of a derivative. f(x) = (x**2-1) / (2*x-3)". The "solution" produced is to just use a symbolic math package's 'diff' function to find the derivative. I assume that the actual intent of the question is for the student to use the definition of a derivative: f'(x) = limit of (f(x+e)-f(x))/e as e goes to zero, to find the derivative of this function, by directly finding this limit.
The "answers" for other questions similarly miss the point. For example, convergence of a series is determined by just asking a symbolic math package whether it converges, not by any actual reasoning, as would be expected of a student. And the question asking for the Type I error probability of a statistical test is "solved" using a simulation program, whereas I expect a human student is expected to get the exact answer by analytical calculation.