Using reinforcement learning to study problems in braiding

Authors: Abraham Harris, Juliana Corbridge
Mentors: Mark Hughes
Insitution: Brigham Young University

Braid closures provide a way to study knots and links in 3-space via group-theoretic techniques. Several important open problems in low-dimensional topology can be reformulated as problems in combinatorial group theory via a particular braid invariant called the band rank. In this talk we will describe the band rank and techniques for computing this quantity which draw on tools from reinforcement learning.