Facebook Invented a New Language for Machines to Solve Complex Math Equations

Using the same kind of technology that translates English into Mandarin, the neural network translates problems into solutions Despite being built by calculus, linear algebra, and an army of statisticians around the world, neural networks have trouble understanding math. Or at least, they have trouble understanding how humanity writes math equations. Facebook’s AI research team, however, claims to have developed a new approach to turn complex math problems into machine-readable data.

And using the same kind of technology that translates English into Mandarin, they were able to translate problems into solutions. The problem is two-fold: How do you explain a math problem to a statistical model, and more importantly, what’s the solution? Facebook’s breakthrough was treating variables and equations as parts of speech.

Similar to diagramming a sentence, the program turns equations into a tree that can be read by a computer like any other language. There’s already an extensive amount of research in machine translation, so the Facebook AI team simply used a popular translation model to map problems to solutions.

Source: vice.com