You are invited at the CSCE Colloquium on Wednesday 03/11/2020 at 10:15. Abstract: Combination puzzles, such as the Rubik’s cube, pose unique challenges for artificial intelligence. Furthermore, solutions to such puzzles are directly linked to problems in the natural sciences. In this talk, I will present DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning and search algorithm that can solve the Rubik’s cube, and six other puzzles, without domain specific knowledge. Next, I will discuss how solving combination puzzles opens up new possibilities for solving problems in the natural sciences. In particular, I will describe how we are using DeepCubeA to tackle problems in chemistry. Finally, I will show how problems we encounter in the natural sciences motivate future research directions. A demonstration of our work can be seen at http://deepcube.igb.uci.edu/. Bio: Forest Agostinelli is a postdoctoral researcher at UC, Irvine. He received his B.S. from the Ohio State University, his M.S. from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from UC, Irvine. His research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, search, bioinformatics, neuroscience, and chemistry. His homepage is located at https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fagostin/.