Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science
Welcome to CDMTCS, a joint venture involving the Computer Science, Mathematics and Philosophy Departments of The University of Auckland in New Zealand. CDMTCS was founded in 1995 to support basic research on the interface between mathematics and computing, to foster research and development in these areas within the South Pacific region, and to create links between researchers in that region and their counterparts in the rest of the world.
News and Events
DeepMind’s AlphaGo and Message from Shane Legg at the Data Science Club 2018
The University of Auckland data science club will be holding a free screening of the 2017 documentary AlphaGo and playing a recorded message from University of Auckland alumnus Shane Legg, who is a cofounder of the artificial intelligence company DeepMind.
DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for US$500 million, and in 2016 developed the program AlphaGo that used a deep neural network and reinforcement learning to beat the world champion of the complex board game Go for the first time. We will be showing the exciting 90 minute documentary, which is rated 8/10 on IMDB, and follows the development of the record-breaking program and its match against then world-champion Lee Sedol in his home country of South Korea.
Shane Legg is one of the three cofounders of DeepMind, and is an alumnus of Auckland university, completing his master's degree in mathematics with complexity theorist Professor Cristian Calude. He went on to complete his PhD in Switzerland on super-intelligent machines, be awarded the $10,000 Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Prize, and take up post-doctoral research at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London, before cofounding DeepMind in 2010. He has kindly agreed to record a message especially to accompany our documentary screening.
Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation 2018
The International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation is a meeting where scientists from many different backgrounds are united in their interest in novel forms of computation, human-designed computation inspired by nature, and computational aspects of natural processes. UCNC provides a forum for such scientists to meet and discuss their work.
The 17th UCNC will be hosted by the University of Paris Est Creteil Val de Marne and it will take place at IUT de Fontainebleau, located in the city of Fontainebleau, former residence of French kings situated near Paris.
Theory matters: Google DeepMind's Go-playing Program Doesn’t Need Human Help
Discrete Mathematics: Discrete Geometry and Convex Bodies 2017
13th International Conference on Discrete Mathematics: Discrete Geometry and Convex Bodies Bucharest 2017, Bucharest, Romania, September 2017.
Artificial General Intelligence 2017
Artificial General Intelligence 2017, Melbourne, Australia, August 2017.
Computing Award 2017
The book C. S. Calude. The Human Face of Computing was included in the 21st Annual Best of Computing. The Notable Books and Articles List for 2016, July 2017.
STOC2017 Award
The paper Cristian Calude, Sanjay Jain, Bakhadyr Khoussainov, Wei Li, Frank Stephan. Deciding Parity Games in Quasipolynomial Time won a Best Award Paper at STOC2017.
Theory matters: Google DeepMind and the last Game of Go
After beating Ke Jie, the world’s best Go player, for the third time at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, Google DeepMind announced that AlphaGo will retire: this was the last game it played because the last summit represented "the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive program".
Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation 2017
The 16th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation was hosted in Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA, a city nestled in the Ozark Mountains and home to the University of Arkansas.
Artificial General Intelligence 2017
The original goal of the AI field was the construction of "thinking machines" – that is, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called "narrow AI" – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field by treating intelligence as a whole. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of “human-level intelligence” and more broadly artificial general intelligence. AGI research differs from the ordinary AI research by stressing on the versatility and wholeness of intelligence, and by carrying out the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind in a certain sense. Continuing the mission of the past AGI conferences, AGI-17 gathers an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).Theory matters: Google DeepMind and the Game of Go
Shane Legg completed the MSc Thesis "Solomonov Induction and Algorithmic Information Theory" (supervisor: Prof. C. S. Calude) in 1996, see his CDMTCS Research Report 030, March 1997: Solomonoff Induction. In 2004 he then got a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland. Shane was active in developing applications of algorithmic information theory to artificial intelligence; a group picture (N. Hay, S. Legg, C. Calude, M. Zimand) from 2006 Dagsthul meeting on Kolmogorov complexity. After a post-doc at University College London, UK, in 2011 he co-founded with Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman the artificial intelligence company DeepMind, from 2014 Google DeepMind (the biggest Google buy in Europe). A team from Google DeepMind published recently the paper Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search in Nature, 28 January 2016; a day before BBC announced that A Google artificial intelligence program [AlphaGo] has beaten the European champion of the board game Go. In March 2016, AlphaGo has won the first three games from a 5-game challenge match in Seoul against the legendary Lee Sedol, the top Go player in the world over the past decade, but lost the fourth. The final game was won again by AlphaGo.
-
Research Areas
