I have not been following developments in this area, so I’m wondering, what AI’s that are specifically designed for symbolic maths (other than Wolfram Alpha) are freely available (ie no payments) out there?

4 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

what AI’s that are specifically designed for symbolic maths

SymPy and SageMath are probably worth trying as top rated open source options

Just now, iNow said:

SymPy and SageMath are probably worth trying as top rated open source options

I would be interested in looking at those.

Any links please ?

Just now, Markus Hanke said:

I have not been following developments in this area, so I’m wondering, what AI’s that are specifically designed for symbolic maths (other than Wolfram Alpha) are freely available (ie no payments) out there?

Why only free versions ?

7 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

I have not been following developments in this area, so I’m wondering, what AI’s that are specifically designed for symbolic maths (other than Wolfram Alpha) are freely available (ie no payments) out there?

I was wondering the same thing.

Given the modular nature of these technologies (from what I gather), an important challenge that comes to mind is whether and/or to what extent, and efficient interfacing between the language-handling and the maths-handling modules can be achieved.

Fatal mistakes can happen at any level, and you wouldn't want your maths module to carry out a calculation to perfection, only to find the LLM operating with the outputs failing to see the significance of a particular result.

That's what human minds achieve to almost perfection, given the necessary conditions.

7 hours ago, joigus said:

whether and/or to what extent, and efficient interfacing between the language-handling and the maths-handling modules can be achieved.

This process is commonly known as mixture of experts. One query calls several different models and the answer coming back is the best from each. “Best” is of course relative, but the outputs from MoE approaches tend to be significantly better than single model queries (at least they were until recent models got so massive and capable with their training corpus kept growing into the billions upon billions of parameters).

7 hours ago, joigus said:

That's what human minds achieve to almost perfection

Depends on the human in my experience.

Edited August 1Aug 1 by iNow

20 minutes ago, iNow said:

Depends on the human in my experience.

Of course. I tried to imply it:

7 hours ago, joigus said:

That's what human minds achieve to almost perfection, given the necessary conditions.

1 hour ago, iNow said:

This process is commonly known as mixture of experts.

This sounds a tad more complicated than what I mean by an "interface" in IT. As I understand, an interface is barely a computer version of a translator. A piece of software/hardware that speaks both languages.

But then again, I'm not an expert on AI by any means. I do remember having studied simple code widgets to generate neural networks many years ago (back in the '90s). As soon as I learned you had to reassure the system, in a manner of speaking, of what is right and wrong as an answer, my initial interest lost considerable momentum. This code was supposedly good at recognizing letters in different typographies. The world has changed a lot since then.

2 hours ago, joigus said:

This sounds a tad more complicated than what I mean by an "interface" in IT.

Think of a pickup truck getting stuck in the mud, maybe in a field on a rural farm somewhere after an overnight rain. Pulling or pushing the truck by hand won’t get you very far, so you amplify your strength using a tool.

Here, maybe our tool is a hand winch or a come-along. We get the chains and wrap them around a century old oak tree 20 yards away then hook the winch to our truck which is still just sitting there stuck in the mud. We start ratcheting it click by click by click for about a hour until after several breaks wiping away sweat and recovering from exhaustion we finally get the truck pulled free and extracted from the mud. The winch here maybe represents classic Google.

Perhaps instead, though, we get the big John Deere tractor we happen to have sitting back in the barn. You know… The one we use to seed a thousand acres of corn every season and to till the field before planting soybeans. The tractor is big and beefy and pulls the truck out of the mud far simpler than our old hand winch did or could. That tractor here might represent some of the earlier AI models and GPTs that have seized the imaginations of so many of our brethren.

Now, imagine instead for a moment that your neighbors are also farmers and they too have big tractors and heavy duty chains. They’re different brands of tractors and have different accessories and modifications made to them for achieving different tasks, but they’re all essentially tractors. You txt or call 7 of those farmer neighbors and ask for their help getting your truck out of the mud. Being good salt of the earth farmers they of course agree to lend a helping hand and they all come over with their 7 different modded and customized tractors and help pull your truck from the mud.

That group of neighbor farmers working alongside you in AI terms might reasonably be called a Mixture of Experts model (whatever reason means, apropos to earlier in this thread, but I digress…).

Same basic query. Same problem to solve. Same general approach of using models as tools to help solve it, but this time you invited more capable and more qualified participants to the party to help solve it all together… sort of like Oppenheimer did on the Manhattan Project. That’s an MoE model.

MoEs are a great way to “reason” through more complex issues and questions, and here’s the kicker… We (humans) have now already reached a point where a SINGLE frontier model is so capable and so powerful all by itself that it no longer needs to request help from those 7 farmer friends in order to achieve the same overwhelming output or performance. And they’re only going to keep getting stronger and more capable in a Moore’s Law type fashion.

Happy weekend, fellas. 🦾

Edited August 2Aug 2 by iNow

18 hours ago, studiot said:

Why only free versions ?

Because I’m an ordained monastic, and in our contemplative tradition we (the individual monks and nuns) live entirely without owning or handling money. Thus, accessing things that aren’t free is complicated for me.

2 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

Because I’m an ordained monastic

So you live in temple or something like that?

1 hour ago, Dhillon1724X said:

So you live in temple or something like that?

Yes, I live in a small forest monastery together with some other monastics.

12 minutes ago, Markus Hanke said:

Yes, I live in a small forest monastery together with some other monastics.

So you are old too.

It’s good to see you are living happy life.

BTW do you have family?

6 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

accessing things that aren’t free is complicated for me

Even those of us who have access to funds don’t generally want to spend $250/month to use models like Gemini 2.5 Deep Think (which is being released to select mathematicians and researchers)

TechCrunch

Google rolls out Gemini Deep Think AI, a reasoning model...

Google released its first publicly available "multi-agent" AI system, which uses more computational resources, but produces better answers.

8 hours ago, iNow said:

Same problem to solve.

The thing is I would expect anything (alive or inanimate)) that can respectably called 'intelligent' to do more than just solve problems set by others.

A highly significant proportion of scientific discoveries have arisen because the researcher was intellignet enough to recognise something othere than what he (or she) was researching.
The discovery of X rays is a prime example.

Edited August 2Aug 2 by studiot

I take your point, but AI has been used to discover things like that already for years in the field of medicine.

20 hours ago, Dhillon1724X said:

So you are old too.

It’s good to see you are living happy life.

BTW do you have family?

It’s generally unwise to disclose too much personal information on social media, so I can’t comment on these.

1 hour ago, Markus Hanke said:

It’s generally unwise to disclose too much personal information on social media, so I can’t comment on these.

Sorry for asking too much.
When i talk with someone old,i want to know if he/she is happy.

8 hours ago, iNow said:

I take your point, but AI has been used to discover things like that already for years in the field of medicine.

References ?

4 hours ago, studiot said:

References ?

Implicit in this request is a suggestion that AI has not been involved for years in medical and pharmaceutical research, which is laughably absurd. My point was self-evident, but I do like and respect you so maybe these primers are a helpful place for you to start:

https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai_index_report_2025.pdf

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-transforming-global-health/

Just now, iNow said:

Implicit in this request is a suggestion that AI has not been involved for years in medical and pharmaceutical research, which is laughably absurd. My point was self-evident, but I do like and respect you so maybe these primers are a helpful place for you to start:

https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/files/hai_ai_index_report_2025.pdf

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-transforming-global-health/

Thank you.

I note your first links refers to 100 years of AI, so I suspect it depends what you (they ?) mean by AI.

I also note their impressive page of sponsors (those who stand to gain)

What was the story about self policing ?

The Romans had a catch phrase for it.

On 8/1/2025 at 9:13 PM, iNow said:

Think of a pickup truck getting stuck in the mud, maybe in a field on a rural farm somewhere after an overnight rain. Pulling or pushing the truck by hand won’t get you very far, so you amplify your strength using a tool.
...
Here, maybe our tool is a hand winch or a come-along. We get the chains and wrap them around a century old oak tree 20 yards away then hook the winch to our truck which is still just sitting there stuck in the mud.
...
Perhaps instead, though, we get the big John Deere tractor we happen to have sitting back in the barn. You know… The one we use to seed a thousand acres of corn every season and to till the field before planting soybeans.

Oh, you must be a farmer from Iowa ...
😄😄

20 hours ago, Dhillon1724X said:

When i talk with someone old,i want to know if he/she is happy.

I’m not yet that old, but yes, I’ve found my way in life. That didn’t happen over night though, and took some doing.

4 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

Yes, and I still do. (in response to "do you think a lot about nature")Uploading Attachment...

What do you think of this story ,Markus?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r7z2ynd2lo4

(A zoo in Denmark asking for pets to be given as contributions to the diet of their resident predators such as the lions, lynxes etc)

It is also a story on CNN....

On 8/5/2025 at 9:49 AM, geordief said:

What do you think of this story ,Markus?

I think euthanising a living being for no good reason other than that is “unwanted” is ethically problematic. If you can’t or don’t want to keep your pet any longer, there are more appropriate options available.

Also, keeping animals locked up in zoos just so we can gawk at them, is likewise ethically questionable.