Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics

charlieyu1

Interesting, if only I still have energy to work on something 40 hours non-stop

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.

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...

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.

amelius

Will BigAI support this with free access to lots of hardware loaded with frontier models?

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.

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.

corinthia

recent caltech grad here! and know some of the organizers well caltech'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!

xqcgrek2

No self respecting mathematician is going to willingly become a marketing tool for these companies solving neglected and irrelevant puzzles.

brian-bfz

Hey guys, I'm one of the organizers. AMA. - We are a team of undergrads at Caltech. We don't represent Caltech, any Caltech departments, or any of our sponsors. - We don't receive monetary compensation. All the funding raised goes toward paying our judges and participants. - Our goal is to promote responsible AI use. You can read more about our commitments here: https://mathathonchallenge.com/faq.html

ondrejdvorak

Hi check zeta.pukapasoft.xyz am I eligible?

deeznuttynutz

This is so freaking cool. I'm super jealous as an old man.

nill0

If anybody is competing in the contest, this may be helpful as a starting point! Open Problems in Computational Geometry Listed by Erik Demaine, Joseph Mitchell, Joseph O'Rourke in 2024 https://topp.openproblem.net/ And also the popular list below, which contains some of the frontier problems and undefeated beasts that have remained unsolved for decades, some even for centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m... Caution: Solvability is not guaranteed!