Automated conjecturing II : chomp and reasoned game play

We demonstrate the use of a program that generates conjectures about positions of the combinatorial game Chomp—explanations of why certain moves are bad. These could be used in the design of a Chomp-playing program that gives reasons for its moves. We prove one of these Chomp conjectures—demonstrating that our conjecturing program can produce genuine Chomp knowledge. The conjectures are generated by a general purpose conjecturing program that was previously and successfully used to generate mathematical conjectures. Our program is initialized with Chomp invariants and example game boards—the conjectures take the form of invariant-relation statements interpreted to be true for all board positions of a certain kind. The conjectures describe a theory of Chomp positions. The program uses limited, natural input and suggests how theories generated on-the-fly might be used in a variety of situations where decisions—based on reasons—are required

The "Artificial Mathematician" Objection: Exploring the (Im)possibility of Automating Mathematical Understanding

Reuben Hersh confided to us that, about forty years ago, the late Paul Cohen predicted to him that at some unspecified point in the future, mathematicians would be replaced by computers. Rather than focus on computers replacing mathematicians, however, our aim is to consider the (im)possibility of human mathematicians being joined by “artificial mathematicians” in the proving practice—not just as a method of inquiry but as a fellow inquirer

Automated conjecturing III : property-relations conjectures

Discovery in mathematics is a prototypical intelligent behavior, and an early and continuing goal of artificial intelligence research. We present a heuristic for producing mathematical conjectures of a certain typical form and demonstrate its utility. Our program conjectures relations that hold between properties of objects (property-relation conjectures). These objects can be of a wide variety of types. The statements are true for all objects known to the program, and are the simplest statements which are true of all these objects. The examples here include new conjectures for the hamiltonicity of a graph, a well-studied property of graphs. While our motivation and experiments have been to produce mathematical conjectures-and to contribute to mathematical research-other kinds of interesting property-relation conjectures can be imagined, and this research may be more generally applicable to the development of intelligent machinery

Computerbeweise und ihr Einfluss auf die Philosophie der Mathematik

Der von Appel und Haken im Jahr 1977 veröffentlichte "Computerbeweis" löste eine Kontroverse unter Mathematikern aus: Es wurde über den Einsatz empirischer Methoden und den Stellenwert eines Beweises in der Mathematik diskutiert. Unterschiedliche Standpunkte werden dargestellt. Es wird untersucht, wie und warum sich die Diskussion über spezielle Probleme, die ein Computerbeweis mit sich bringt, auf allgemeine philosophische Grundlagen der Mathematik ausweitete