Thatchaphol Saranurak รีทวีตแล้ว
The greatest living mathematician just solved 22 million math problems and is now asking the internet to fit the answers on a single page.
Terence Tao, Fields Medalist, co-founded SAIR Foundation earlier this year with Nobel, Turing, and Fields laureates to run AI-powered science at scale. Their first project: the Equational Theories Project. Humans, automated theorem provers, and Lean formal verification working together for seven months. 4,694 equational laws. Every possible logical implication between them mapped and formally proven. 22,028,942 edges in a single implication graph.
Now Tao and SAIR are turning that dataset into a competition.
The constraint: 10 kilobytes. That’s roughly 10,000 characters. A single page of text. The challenge is to distill 22 million verified mathematical results into a prompt so effective that a cheap, open-source AI model currently performing at coin-flip accuracy starts getting 55% to 60% of them right.
This is a test of what mathematicians actually know versus what they think they know. The ETP used brute-force computation, automated provers like Vampire (which alone resolved 99.995% of queries), and months of ad hoc human proofs for the hardest dozen cases. The knowledge exists. The question is whether it can be stated simply enough for a small model to use it.
Tao’s framing says everything. He compared the cheat sheet to what a struggling undergrad brings into a final exam: one page of notes that makes or breaks the grade. Except the exam is 22 million questions and the student is an LLM with no reasoning ability.
Stage 1 submissions close April 20. The top 1,000 advance to Stage 2, which requires actual proofs instead of true/false answers.
SAIR’s board reads like a roster of the people who built the foundations that AI systems are now trying to learn from. And their first public competition is asking the crowd to teach a cheap model what the best mathematicians and the best theorem provers took seven months to figure out.
If the winning cheat sheet works, it tells us something profound about how much mathematical knowledge is compressible. If it doesn’t, it tells us something equally important about what machines still can’t learn from text alone.
SAIR@SAIRfoundation
Our co-founder Terence Tao is announcing SAIR Foundation's inaugural competition: the Mathematics Distillation Challenge. Co-organized by @damekdavis, Terence Tao, and SAIR Foundation. competition.sair.foundation/competitions/m…
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