HN

Comments (29)

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  Semkas
  Won't deny that this is an interesting idea, but I feel like waiting on the output of an LLM for 40 hours feels like it is completely antithetical to what makes classic Hackathons appealing / educative.More generally, I don't think the shape of a hackathon (intensely working for a short timespan) maps at all onto the way LLM Math progress has seemingly been made so far; AFAIK it mostly involves picking out something for the Model, then having it run for a week with sporadic correction / encouragement.
• corinthia
  recent caltech grad here! and know some of the organizers wellcaltech's cs department is very, very weak, and has struggled to recruit top people in the last few years, and the most recent AI faculty hires have had issues. this is very slowly changing but a lot of the motivation for htis was to create a way for students to get ml "recognition" and learn about ai since it cant be done through the school right now. really glad to see hn picked this up!
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  youoy
  Should I read this as the big labs trying to move maths forward? Or the big labs trying to use professional mathematitians as (cheap?) Labour for validating LLM outputs? On yesterdays "An Alien Mind" post from openAI they openly said that maths is not a priority for them, so I personally know what to think...
• viccis
  No it's not, there are tons of programs in mathematics where you go there, form teams, work a problem as a team that's likely to get a result, and then publish the results from all the groups in the conference proceedings. They are called Research Collaboration Workshops.Very consistent pattern from these tech companies in their mathematics press releases that shows a conspicuous lack of experience in the research math world.
• chaoxu
  I've applied as a team, hope I get in.Recently I care about how to create harness for mathematics that uses up the complete reasoning ability of the model. I care about both capability and cost.Most generic harness we have now are not made for maximizing reasoning. I've tested agents like codex, and rarely the cost of reasoning tokens reaches more than 20%. Which is quite strange as math requires a lot of reasoning. So hackathons can be a good test bed.
• boothby
  > It will be the first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics.Well, that's pretty damned ignorant; I was attending William Stein's hackathons on the BSD conjecture and the Sage Math project nearly 2 decades ago.
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  charlieyu1
  Interesting, if only I still have energy to work on something 40 hours non-stop
• amelius
  Will BigAI support this with free access to lots of hardware loaded with frontier models?
• anon
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