Comment by saagarjha
5 days ago
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.
Thanks for speaking sense. I think 99% of people saying IMO problems are not hard would not be able to solve basic district-level competition problems and are just not equipped to judge the problems.
And 1% here are those IMO/IOI winners who think everyone is just like them. I grew up with them and to you, my friends, I say: this is the reason why AI would not take over the world (and might even not be that useful for real world tasks), even if it wins every damn contest out there.
I feel like people see the question (or even the solution), they can actually understand what it says because it’s only using basic algebraic notation, then assume it must be easy to solve. Obviously it must be easier than that funny math with weird symbols…