The Problem With Knot Theory

Lisa Picciurillo says we have heaps and heaps of slices and variants. And none of them are perfect invariance, so you could ask for a knot that sits at the intersection of each of these types of inviolable knots. Unfortunately, those knots exist and the Conway knot is one of them. Mathematician Mark Hughes of Brigham Young University created a neural network to make predictions about features like slice-ness. For most knots, the network makes clear predictions. But it's guess about whether the Conway Knot is smoothly slice? 50-50.