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I've only glanced at the paper, but from that glance it seems that it does not "solve and explain" these problems in any thing like the sense that this would me
by radford-neal 4y ago
I've only glanced at the paper, but from that glance it seems that it does not "solve and explain" these problems in any thing like the sense that this would mean for a human student doing the problems.
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.
- psyklic 4y agoThe paper states it is "incapable of solving ... questions with solutions that require proofs."
- radford-neal 4y agoThen they shouldn't apply it to questions that require proofs, and then claim that the system solves them when it doesn't.
- e_joules 4y agoSee, 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.
- radford-neal 4y agoYes, it could be useful, if seen as a natural language front-end to a symbolic math package.
- buescher 4y agoThat's been done - Wolfram Alpha.
- JadeNB 4y agoThe 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.
- buescher 4y agoSure, but nobody in academia is going to get anywhere describing their work as writing a replacement for Excel, right?
- JadeNB 4y agoI'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.
- riku_iki 4y ago> 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.