logoalt Hacker News

Maxproof

95 pointsby ilrebtoday at 12:00 PM8 commentsview on HN

Comments

daquisutoday at 1:40 PM

"I thought it was interesting and a bit underappreciated that the fraction of gold medalists at the 2025 IMO (72/630 = 11.4%) is the highest it’s been since 1981.

Crudely, IMO gold medals are awarded to the highest-scoring 1/12 of contestants.1 However, because scores are integers up to 42 and there’s no provision for tiebreaking, it’s possible for a lot of contestants to be tied around the threshold. In that case, either all of them get a gold medal or none do, and the fraction of gold medalists might deviate substantially from 1/12. That’s what happened this year: 46 contestants all won a gold medal by scoring exactly 35 points.

In fact, bizarrely, 35 is the mode of the scores this year; the last time the modal score was a gold medal score was in 1994. And, of course, 35 is the same score claimed by AI systems from Google, OpenAI, and others."

From https://blog.vero.site/post/imo-2025

show 2 replies
pfannltoday at 1:45 PM

The real AGI test is apparently not solving the IMO, but getting caught in the same scoring traffic jam as 46 teenagers.

thierrydamibatoday at 2:23 PM

Is the harness more valuable than the weights?

korbonitstoday at 2:44 PM

Proves the need for more formal verification :)

minimaxirtoday at 2:38 PM

not a good day to be named Max

uyuyuytoday at 2:33 PM

[dead]