AI solves IMO problems at silver medal level

Re:AI solves IMO problems at silver medal level by wongarsu on Thursday July 25, 2024 @12:20PM (#41070449)

The problem solved "within minutes" is also interesting. I'd interpret that as somewhere between 2 and 59 minutes. Given the vagueness probably on the higher end, otherwise they'd celebrate it more. The students had 6 tasks in 9 hours, so on average 1.5h per task. If you add the time a student would take to (correctly!) translate the problems to their input format, their best-case runtime is probably about as fast as a silver-medalist would take to solve the problem on their own.

But even if they aren't as fast as humans yet this is very valuable. Both as a stepping stone, and because at a certain scale compute is much easier to scale than skilled mathematicians.

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Re:AI solves IMO problems at silver medal level by gjm11 on Thursday July 25, 2024 @12:35PM (#41070610)

They say "our systems" (presumably meaning AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2) solved one problem "within minutes", and later on the page they say that the geometry question (#4) was solved by AlphaGeometry in 19 seconds.

So either (1) "within minutes" was underselling the abilities of the system, or (2) what they actually meant was that the geometry problem was solved in 19 seconds, one of the others "within minutes" (I'd guess #1 which is definitely easier than the other two they solved), and the others in unspecified times of which the longer was ~3 days.

I'd guess it's the first of those.

(Euclidean geometry has been a kinda-solved domain for some time; it's not super-surprising that they were able to solve that problem quickly.)

As for the long solve times, I would guess they're related to this fascinating remark:

> The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.

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Re:AI solves IMO problems at silver medal level by visarga on Thursday July 25, 2024 @01:10PM (#41070984)

Euclidian Geometry still requires constructions to solve, and those are based in intuition.

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Re:AI solves IMO problems at silver medal level by gjm11 on Thursday July 25, 2024 @05:03PM (#41073355)

There are known algorithms that can solve _all_ problems in euclidean (ruler-and-compasses) geometry, no intuition required. The most effective algorithms of this type are quite inefficient, though, and (at least according to DeepMind) don't do as well as AlphaGeometry does at e.g. IMO geometry problems.

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