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
Theory matters: Google DeepMind and the kast 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".
STOC 2017 Best Paper Award for the paper C. S. Calude, S. Jain, B. Khoussainov, W. Li, F. Stephan. Deciding parity games in quasipolynomial time, 2017.
Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation 2017
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 16th UCNC will take place 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.
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Research Areas
