Comment by gus_massa
5 days ago
In the IMO, the idea is that the first day you get P1, P2 and P3, and the second day you get P4, P5 and P6. Usually, ordered by difficulty, they are P1, P4, P2, P5, P3, P6. So, usually P1 is "easy" and P6 is very hard. At least that is the intended order, but sometime reality disagree.
Edit: Fixed P4 -> P3. Thanks.
In this case P6 was unusually hard and P3 was unusually easy https://sugaku.net/content/imo-2025-problems/
Yikes. 30 years ago I would eat this stuff up and I was the lead dev on 3D engines.
Now I can't even make heads-or-tails of what P6 is even asking (＾▽＾)
You have P4 twice in there, latter should be 3
That's very silly. They should do the order like this:
Day 1: P1 P3 P5 (odds)
Day 2: P2 P4 P6 (evens)
Then the problem # is the difficulty.
On one hand, it's very difficult to break traditions.
On the other hand, the order P1 P4 P2 P5 P3 P6 is not always true.
Usually there is only one problem of geometry per day.
Some problems involve a brilliant trick and another analyzing many cases. You don't want too "long" problems the same day. (Sometimes there is solution that the Jury didn't see and the problem changes it of made-up-category.)
Some problems are difficult but have a nice easy/medium intermediate step that assigns some points.
There are a lot of implicit restrictions that can affect the order of the problem.
Also, sometimes the Jury miscalculate how difficult is a problem and it's easier or more difficult than expected. Or the Jury completely miss an alternative easier solution.
The only sure part is the order that they are printed in the paper.