SAIR competition: Andrew-Curtis challenge

[This is a guest post by Lucas Fagan. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] I am excited to announce the Andrews–Curtis Conjecture Challenge, which opens today. This challenge is a collaboration between the SAIR Foundation and the Math-AI group at Caltech, organized by Sergei Gukov, Terence Tao, and myself. The Andrews–Curtis conjecture is one of the most prominent open problems in combinatorial group theory and also has deep connections to low-dimensional topology. Its potential counterexamples are relevant to the search for exotic smooth four-spheres and the smooth four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture, as well as the Generalized Property R conjecture about surgery on links. Yet unlike many open problems at its level, Andrews–Curtis can be formulated as a combinatorial search problem with easily checkable solutions, making it ideal for a challenge of this form. At Caltech, we have been developing reinforcement learning and…