[earthicus]

I don't think that characterization is fair at all. It's certainly true that you, me, and most humans can't solve these problems with any amount of time or energy. But the problems are specifically written to be at the limit of what the actual high school students who participate can solve in four hours. Letting the actual students taking the test have four days instead of four hours would make a massive difference in their ability to solve them.

Said differently, the students, difficulty of the problems, and time limit are specifically coordinated together, so the amount of joules of energy used to produce a solution is not arbitrary. In the grand scheme of how the tech will improve over time, it seems likely that doesn't matter and the computers will win by any metric soon enough, but Tao is completely correct to point out that you haven't accurately told us what the machines can do today, in July 2025, without telling us ahead of time exactly what rules you are modifying.

[scotty79]

> you haven't accurately told us what the machines can do today

It told us that using probably unreasonable compute they can solve few math problems that are very hard to solve for high-schools students in 4 hours. That's all the rules. No need to state them ahead of time or at all because they are obvious from the context.

It was just a fun thing to check and good meme for the media. Obviously the machines can do a lot more in some aspects and a lot less in others.

If we at least maintain the current pace in few years instead of machines solving 5 problems almost all high-schools students are incapable of solving in 4 hours they are gonna solve a problem Terence Tao is not capable of solving in one lifetime. Hopefully.