Finding Increasingly Large Extremal Graphs with AlphaZero and Tabu Search

This work proposes a new learning-to-search benchmark and uses AI to discover new mathematical knowledge related to an open conjecture of Erdos (1975) in extremal graph theory. The problem is to find graphs with a given size (number of nodes) that maximize the number of edges without having 3- or 4-cycles. We formulate this as a sequential decision-making problem and compare AlphaZero, a neural network-guided tree search, with tabu search, a heuristic local search method. Using either method, by introducing a curriculum---jump-starting the search for larger graphs using good graphs found at smaller sizes---we improve the state-of-the-art lower bounds for several sizes. We also propose a flexible graph-generation environment and a permutation-invariant network architecture for learning to search in the space of graphs.