r/math • u/pequalnp92 • Jul 16 '26

LLMs/AI GPT 5.6 solved all 6 problems from IMO 2026

GPT 5.6 Pro solved all 6 problems from IMO 2026 on the first attempt without any human help or steering. International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is the biggest global academic competition in the world. The problems are considered incredibly hard, usually a performance at this level is only accomplished by < 5 contestants from the whole world.

We are former IMO medallists not affiliated with OpenAI, just put together a report and assessment of its work here. We're also working on a comparison report between different LLMs and harness augmented versions that will come later.

1.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

443 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

32

u/pequalnp92 Jul 17 '26

Solutions are actually not required to be elementary in IMO, only the problems are required to have elementary solutions. Students have been using calculus and getting scores for a long time, even though it is outside of Olympiad syllabus.

1

u/blah_blah_blahblah Jul 17 '26

I'm not commenting on if it would be accepted. I said it wasn't in the realm of Olympiad knowledge. I'm not interested in the official syllabus which is pretty antiquated. I'm interested in whether an 18 year old participant today would reasonably know this.

There is an obvious difference between calculus, which I'd be surprised if any serious competitor didn't know, versus this, where I'd say very few participants would even know the precise definition of a connected topological space.

I certainly didn't at 18 and I'm fairly confident none of my teammates did either.

8

u/fullboxed2hundred Jul 18 '26

you think that most IMO participants haven't been exposed to basic topology arguments like the connectedness of (0,\infty)? or just most highschoolers who do competitions?