Step-by-step math problems, new from Google
During the last years we have dedicated many articles to recommend sites that help solve math problems step by step, and today we add an option that can help a lot in the future.
It is a new Google project, an Artificial Intelligence designed for it called Minerva.
They talk about it on ai.googleblog.com, and they do so by highlighting the following points:
– It is designed to solve quantitative reasoning problems. Create solutions with numerical calculations and interpret symbols.
– It understands natural language, mathematical notation and a combination of both, so that we can give it a problem, like the one in school exercises, and expect a result. The level reaches university, we are not just talking about basic mathematics. Here you have one of the 110 examples published on github.
– This artificial intelligence is based on PaLM (Pathaways Language Model) and has been trained with more than 100 GB of scientific articles from arXiv with mathematical expressions in various languages.
– At the moment mistakes are still being made, but it is a first step towards achieving artificial intelligence in the future that solves problems that human beings have not yet managed to solve.
They continue to work on refining the model and getting answers with a better defined structure, and they will surely publish the progress on their Artificial Intelligence blog in the coming years.
How Minerva differs from current applications
In the link in the first paragraph you have some applications designed to solve mathematical problems step by step, but in most cases we are talking about simple problems that need an entry with a specific structure. Derivatives, fractions, some trigonometry…
Existing solutions fail to interpret text such as “Luis is twice Pedro’s age and in 20 years he will be triple”, they need the equation for the platforms to clear and simplify, but they don’t interpret text.
This is where AI comes in, a technology that could transform the text of a problem statement into equations that can be solved step by step, using exercises that were part of the AI training at the time.
What we can do in the future with Minerva
Anyone even a bit fond of science fiction will know that in “the future” we will be able to ask a computer anything and get an immediate answer. This is the first step to getting quick answers to problems that would take humanity years to solve, to generating reliable information on the amount of fuel needed to take a specific rocket to the moon, or to finding new statements to problems that not even we knew they existed.
Logically, I’m already digressing. At the moment he continues with the age of Pedro and Luís, but we will have to follow his step closely.
You can read more about Minerva in this study in PDF.
