Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 737 posts

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#31

Post by npinsker »

gametorch wrote: post #26
ktallett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Getting gold at the IMO is pretty damn hard. I grew up in a relatively underserved rural city. I skipped multiple grades in math, completed the first two years of college math classes while in high school, and won the award for being the best at math out of everyone in my school. I've met and worked with a few IMO gold medalists. Even though I was used to scoring in the 99th percentile on all my tests, it felt like t…

The trouble is, getting an IMO gold medal is much easier (by frequency) than being the #1 Go player in the world, which was achieved by AI 10 years ago. I'm not sure it's enough to just gesture at the task; drilling down into precisely how it was achieved feels important.

(Not to take away from the result, which I'm really impressed by!)

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#32

Post by Davidzheng »

ktallett wrote: post #29
Davidzheng wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry but I don't think it's accurate to say "they are just challenging for the age range"

I'm aware you believe they are impossible tasks unless you have specific training, I happen to disagree with that.

you meaning specific IMO training or general math training? Latter is certainly needed, former being needed in my opinion is a general observation for example about the people who make it on the teams.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#33

Post by Davidzheng »

ktallett wrote: post #28
Davidzheng wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I assure you >50% of working mathematicians will not score gold level at IMO consistently (I'm in the field). As the original parent said, pretty much only ppl who had the training in high school can. Like number theorists without training might be able to do some number theory IMO questions but this level is basically impossible without specialized training (with maybe a few exceptions of very strong mathematicia…

I sense we may just have a different experience related to colleagues skill sets as I can think of 5 people I could send some questions too and I know they would do them just fine. Infact we often have done similar problems on a free afternoon and I often do similar on flights as a way to pass the time and improve my focus (my issue isn't my talent/understanding at maths, it's my ability to concentrate). I don't disa…

I mean these problems you can get better with practice. But if you haven't solved many before and can do them after an afternoon of thought I would be very impressed. Not that I don't believe you, it's just in my experience people like this are very rare. (Also I assume they have to have some degree of familarity of some common tricks otherwise they would have to derive basic number theory from scratch etc and that seems a bit much for me to believe)

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#34

Post by Davidzheng »

credit_guy wrote: post #30
Davidzheng wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I assure you >50% of working mathematicians will not score gold level at IMO consistently (I'm in the field). As the original parent said, pretty much only ppl who had the training in high school can. Like number theorists without training might be able to do some number theory IMO questions but this level is basically impossible without specialized training (with maybe a few exceptions of very strong mathematicia…

> No I assure you >50% of working mathematicians will not score gold level at IMO consistently (I'm in the field) I agree with you. However, would a lot of working mathematicians score gold level without the IMO time constraints? Working mathematicians generally are not trying to solve a problem in the time span of one hour. I would argue that most working mathematicians, if given an arbitrary IMO problem and allowed…

I mean. Back when I was practicing these problems sometimes I would try them on/off for a week and would be able to do some 3&6's (usually I can do 1&4 somewhat consistently and usually none of others). As a working mathematician today, I would almost certain not be able to get gold medal performance in a week but for a given problem I guess I would have ~50% chance at least of solving it in a week? But I haven't tried in a while. But I suspect the professionals here do worse at these competition questions than you think. I mean certain these problems are "easy" compared to many of the questions we think about, but expertise drastically shifts the speed/difficulty of questions we can solve within our domains, if that makes sense.

Addendum: Actually I am not sure the probability of solving it in a week is not much better than 6 hours for these questions because they are kind of random questions. But I agree with some parts of your post tbf.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#35

Post by ktallett »

Davidzheng wrote: post #33
ktallett wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense we may just have a different experience related to colleagues skill sets as I can think of 5 people I could send some questions too and I know they would do them just fine. Infact we often have done similar problems on a free afternoon and I often do similar on flights as a way to pass the time and improve my focus (my issue isn't my talent/understanding at maths, it's my ability to concentrate). I don't disa…

I mean these problems you can get better with practice. But if you haven't solved many before and can do them after an afternoon of thought I would be very impressed. Not that I don't believe you, it's just in my experience people like this are very rare. (Also I assume they have to have some degree of familarity of some common tricks otherwise they would have to derive basic number theory from scratch etc and that s…

I think honestly it's probably different experiences and skillsets. I find these sort of things doable bar dumb mistakes by myself, yet there will be other things I'll get stressed and not be able to do for ages (some lab skills no matter the number of times I do them and some physical equation derivations that I regularly muck up). I maybe sometimes assume that what comes easy for me, comes easy for all, and what I struggle with, everyone struggles with and that's probably not always the case. Likewise I did similar tasks as a teen in school and assume that is possibly the case for many academically bright so to speak but perhaps isn't so that probably helped me learn some tricks that I may not have otherwise. But as you say I do feel that you can learn the tricks and learn how to do them, even in older age (academically speaking) if you have the time and the patience and the right guide.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#37

Post by ktallett »

Davidzheng wrote: post #32
ktallett wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware you believe they are impossible tasks unless you have specific training, I happen to disagree with that.

you meaning specific IMO training or general math training? Latter is certainly needed, former being needed in my opinion is a general observation for example about the people who make it on the teams.

I mean IMO training, as yes I agree you wouldn't be able to do this without a complete Math knowledge.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#39

Post by gametorch »

ktallett wrote: post #38
gametorch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high school/early university maths problems should not have been a stretch at all for it This is a ridiculous understatement of the difficulty of getting gold at the IMO.

[flagged]

Okay, let's see you try any one of the past IMOs and show us your score.

It's really hard.

See my other comment. I was voted the best at math in my entire high school by my teachers, completed the first two years of college classes while still in high school. I've tried IMO problems for fun. I'm very happy if I get one right. I'd be infinitely satisfied to score a perfect on 3 out of 6 problems and that's nowhere near gold.

Re: OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025

#40

Post by saagarjha »

ktallett wrote: post #7
demirbey05 wrote: post #4

Progress is astounding. Recently report published about evaluation of LLMs on IMO 2025. o3 high didn't even get bronze. https://matharena.ai/imo/ Waiting for Terry Tao's thoughts, but these kind of things are good use of AI. We need to make science progress faster rather than disrupting our economy without being ready.

[flagged]

I did competitive math in high school and I can confidently say that they are anything but "basic". I definitely can't solve them now (as an adult) and it's likely I never will. The same is true for most people, including people who actually pursued math in college (I didn't). I'm not going to be the next guy who unknowingly challenges a Putnam winner to do these but I will just say that it is unlikely that someone who actually understands the difficulty of these problems would say that they are not hard.

For those following along but without math specific experience: consider whether your average CS professor could solve a top competitive programming question. Not Leetcode hard, Codeforces hard.

Post reply on HN