Machines are getting better at maths – artificial intelligence has learned to solve university-level calculus problems in seconds. François Charton and Guillaume Lample at Facebook AI Research trained an AI on tens of millions of calculus problems randomly generated by a computer. The problems were mathematical expressions that involved integration, a common technique in calculus for finding the area under a curve. To find solutions, the AI used natural language processing (NLP), a computational tool commonly used to analyse language. This works because the mathematics in each problem can be thought of as a sentence, with variables, normally denoted x, playing the role of nouns and operations, such as finding the square root, playing the role of verbs.

If today's college students could find a way to get their hands on a copy of Facebook's latest neural network, they could cheat all the way through Calc 3. They could even solve the differential equation pictured above in under 30 seconds. Okay, so maybe this isn't going to be a replacement for Wolfram Alpha anytime soon, but Facebook really did build a neural net that can complete complex mathematical problems for the first time, rather than the plain old arithmetic in which these AI models usually wheel and deal. The work represents a huge leap forward in computers' abilities to understand mathematical logic. The research is outlined in a new paper, "Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics," published in arXiv, a repository of scientific research in areas like math, computer science, and physics, run by Cornell University.