Caltech Mathathon: 40 hours, $2M+ in AI credits, solve an open problem
Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
Caltech is hosting the first hackathon devoted to research-level mathematics. On October 30th, a hundred teams will use frontier AI models to tackle open conjectures and build new mathematical theories, then defend their results before leading mathematicians. With recent AI breakthroughs—including the disproof of an 80-year-old conjecture and the construction of a non-sofic group—the event aims to explore how AI can accelerate mathematical discovery and redefine the role of mathematicians. Prizes will be awarded for promising results, with a second round after community verification.
AI has made groundbreaking progress in pure math in the past few months.
- xqcgrek2
No self respecting mathematician is going to willingly become a marketing tool for these companies solving neglected and irrelevant puzzles.
- 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...
- 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!
- 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.