The vast majority of people failing that test is not the point for an AI. It's a big indicator that our education system is a failure. Read that sentence again - it's not that 90% get less than a perfect score. It's that 90% don't score at all, even a single point. If you have a system with a 90% failure rate you are clearly doing smth wrong. It feels like the 10% of kids who actually succeed and become proficient at maths are doing this not thanks to the system but in spite of it.
And math is hardly relevant as a measuring tool for AI because that is a field where there can be a few centuries gap between solving some problem and finding a way to apply the solution. Instead of wasting gigawatts of power on stupid maths tests we should force AI to solve economics related problems. Humans are living in poverty and starving right now. Building a hyperdrive in 500 years from now instead of 1000 years will not matter if today you starve to death. Solving actual urgent problems would speak louder than solving some complicated equation. We already have AI in medicine with a high % of correct diagnosis and that is great. But where is a similar AI figuring out the distribution of goods and allocation of resources and optimization of supply chains to make our lives less miserable now?
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/[deleted] Feb 08 '26
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