English

MathZero, The Classification Problem, and Set-Theoretic Type Theory

Logic in Computer Science 2020-05-19 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

AlphaZero learns to play go, chess and shogi at a superhuman level through self play given only the rules of the game. This raises the question of whether a similar thing could be done for mathematics -- a MathZero. MathZero would require a formal foundation and an objective. We propose the foundation of set-theoretic dependent type theory and an objective defined in terms of the classification problem -- the problem of classifying concept instances up to isomorphism. The natural numbers arise as the solution to the classification problem for finite sets. Here we generalize classical Bourbaki set-theoretic isomorphism to set-theoretic dependent type theory. To our knowledge we give the first isomorphism inference rules for set-theoretic dependent type theory with propositional set-theoretic equality. The presentation is intended to be accessible to mathematicians with no prior exposure to type theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.05512,
  title  = {MathZero, The Classification Problem, and Set-Theoretic Type Theory},
  author = {David McAllester},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.05512},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:28:36.315Z