Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

1 day ago

I hear the LLM was able to parrot fragments of the stuff it was trained to memorize, and did very well

Yeah, that must be it.

  • Well being able to extrapolate solutions to "novel" mathematical exercises based on a very large sample of similar tasks in your dataset seems like a reasonable explanation.

    Question is how well it would do if it was trained without those samples?

    • Gee, I don't know. How would you do at a math competition if you weren't trained with math books? Sample problems and solutions are not sufficient unless you can genuinely apply human-level inductive and deductive reasoning to them. If you don't understand that and agree with it, I don't see a way forward here.

      A more interesting question is, how would you do at a math competition if you were taught to read, then left alone in your room with a bunch of math books? You wouldn't get very far at a competition like IMO, calculator or no calculator, unless you happen to be some kind of prodigy at the level of von Neumann or Ramanujan.

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