The researchers started by sketching out the problem they wanted to solve in Python, a popular programming language. But they left out the lines in the program that would specify how to solve it. That is where FunSearch comes in. It gets Codey to fill in the blanks—in effect, to suggest code that will solve the problem.
A second algorithm then checks and scores what Codey comes up with. The best suggestions—even if not yet correct—are saved and given back to Codey, which tries to complete the program again. “Many will be nonsensical, some will be sensible, and a few will be truly inspired,” says Kohli. “You take those truly inspired ones and you say, ‘Okay, take these ones and repeat.’”
After a couple of million suggestions and a few dozen repetitions of the overall process—which took a few days—FunSearch was able to come up with code that produced a correct and previously unknown solution to the cap set problem, which involves finding the largest size of a certain type of set. Imagine plotting dots on graph paper. The cap set problem is like trying to figure out how many dots you can put down without three of them ever forming a straight line.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics.
In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle—producing verifiable and valuable new information that did not previously exist.
FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it’s fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental math and computer science that DeepMind has made using AI.
Built on top of DeepMind’s game-playing AI AlphaZero, both solved math problems by treating them as if they were puzzles in Go or chess.
It combines a large language model called Codey, a version of Google’s PaLM 2 that is fine-tuned on computer code, with other systems that reject incorrect or nonsensical answers and plug good ones back in.
Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has won many of the top awards in mathematics, including the Fields Medal, called the cap set problem “perhaps my favorite open question” in a 2007 blog post.
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