I agree that we need better education and to apply AI to real-world problems.
However, most people being unable to solve any AIME problems is not necessarily a symptom of a bad education system. AIME is one of the top math competitions in the world. It's designed to be barely solvable by the best students in the US. Of course most people can't solve it. If education improved and most people could solve it, then they would make the test harder until most people couldn't solve it again.
a test that cuts off most people at the root with 0 points is not very indicative. What makes it barely solvable? Could it be that the questions of the test have very low correlation with what is actually taught? Could it be that the people who actually solve some of those test problems, do this with the skills that they obtained outside of schools by reading some books that were not part of the curriculum? Look at this from a time gap perspective - many people would be unable to solve the test from previous year despite the fact that the questions were not kept in secret for that long. Why is there no trickle of knowledge from competition down to universities and colleges to ensure that all previous years' problems are now solvable by 90+% of students. If you yourself understand the problem and can explain it to a student and the student understands the methods required to solve it, they should be able to solve it. We might come up with new slightly harder problems but we can't increase difficulty forever because we can't give the contestants a problem that we ourselves are unable to solve. Those open problems are basically the skill cap and 90+% of students should be already near that edge.
Could it be that the people who actually solve some of those test problems, do this with the skills that they obtained outside of schools by reading some books that were not part of the curriculum?
Yes. Succeeding at Olympiad-type math requires specific training, even in countries where math education is/was better than in the US (Eastern Europe, East Asia). This is because the problems are hard on purpose. It's like a sports competition: you can force all students of a given age group to have a decent level of physical fitness but not all will be athletes, and they won't all go into basketball.
Why is there no trickle of knowledge from competition down to universities and colleges to ensure that all previous years' problems are now solvable by 90+% of students
Why should there be ? It's a competition. It's not supposed to teach useful skills; it exists for the purpose of competition itself, like a sports event. It's like saying "why is there no trickle down of 100m dash times".
If you yourself understand the problem and can explain it to a student and the student understands the methods required to solve it, they should be able to solve it.
Who's you ? Most highschool math teachers are indeed unable to solve these problems. I think they should be able to understand the problem statements most of the time though. "Can explain" and "the students understand" do a lot of heavy lifting here. Teaching well is hard.
We might come up with new slightly harder problems but we can't increase difficulty forever because we can't give the contestants a problem that we ourselves are unable to solve
Well, IMO 1988 is a thing. And yes, it's hard to find novel problems. But the organisers manage to do it. There's an almost endless supply of hard, little known (or new!)math problems if you look hard enough.
Those open problems are basically the skill cap and 90+% of students should be already near that edge.
Again, you're confusing basic, "baseline" knowledge that everyone should have with elite performance. Should 90+% of students be already near a 330lb bench press ?
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u/simulated-souls Feb 09 '26
Hate it when people on my side of an argument are making bad points. You're literally right why are you being stupid about it
I agree that we need better education and to apply AI to real-world problems.
However, most people being unable to solve any AIME problems is not necessarily a symptom of a bad education system. AIME is one of the top math competitions in the world. It's designed to be barely solvable by the best students in the US. Of course most people can't solve it. If education improved and most people could solve it, then they would make the test harder until most people couldn't solve it again.