What is the background of the math competition she participated in?, Technical secondary school genius girl Jiang Ping became popular

Release time:Jun 15, 2024 10:09 AM

The 17-year-old genius girl Jiang Ping has become famous. In the final list of the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition, she ranked 12th with a high score of 93 points, and was also the first secondary school student to enter the finals. The students before and after her were from world-renowned universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Cambridge.

After Jiang Ping became popular, the Alibaba Mathematical Competition also became popular. Some people couldn't help but wonder: Why would an e-commerce company that sells goods hold a math competition?

Since junior high school, Jiang Ping has shown a keen sense of mathematics. She can find the solution to a problem that others can't solve at a glance. Although she had a serious imbalance in her performance in certain subjects, she found the "beauty of mathematics" in a technical college.

A top-notch monthly exam result caught the attention of math teacher Wang Runqiu. At the teacher's suggestion, Jiang Ping started with Tongji University's "Advanced Mathematics", then Xie Huimin's "Mathematical Analysis" and Lawrence Evans' "Partial Differential Equations"... Advanced mathematics opened another door for Jiang Ping besides her major in fashion.

At the suggestion of Wang Runqiu, Jiang Ping signed up for the Ali Mathematics Competition and became famous in one battle. In the preliminaries, she scored an excellent score of 93 points, ranking 12th in the world, beating all the contestants majoring in mathematics, and was the only girl in the top 30. At present, Jiang Ping likes and is best at partial differential equations, which are usually used to describe the complex interactions between multiple independent variables. This is similar to the drawing of fashion design, "Their symmetry is so beautiful."

Today, Jiang Ping's dream is to go to university and continue her interest in mathematics. Some universities have already extended olive branches to her.

Jiang Ping is not the only "genius teenager" on the finals list. The average age of the finalists this year is only 22 years old. In addition to students from well-known universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, MIT, and Cambridge, there are also many middle school students, such as Deng Leyan from Shanghai Private Huayu Middle School, who ranked 26th and is also a leader in the finals.

The origin of the Alibaba Mathematical Competition can be traced back to the fall of 2018. At that time, Jack Ma invited 11 top mathematicians from China, Britain, Russia, Belgium, Hungary and other countries to Hangzhou to talk about mathematics for an hour and a half. The topic they discussed was - Is mathematics useful?

As a result of the conversation, they decided to hold a mathematics competition, which was the only online mathematics competition in the world at that time. It was completely interest-oriented and anyone could participate.

From 2018 to 2019, the first Alibaba Mathematics Competition was held, attracting more than 40,000 participants, and ultimately 51 people won awards, including Olympic gold medalists such as Wei Dongyi.

It cannot add extra points to the college entrance examination and is not linked to internships or employment, but the Alibaba Mathematical Competition has taken a unique path to competition.

It is reported that there is no threshold for the competition. Previous registrants have ranged from 14-year-old junior high school students to 83-year-old seniors. So far, mathematics enthusiasts from all six continents have participated in this competition.

According to the competition rules, the Alibaba Mathematics Competition is divided into two rounds: the preliminary round and the final round, and the entire process is answered online. The preliminary round focuses on testing mathematical thinking and encourages enthusiasts to participate more. The competition questions are interesting and very life-like, such as Master Zhang spinning noodles in the canteen, calculating how to maintain a safe distance in the observation room during the epidemic, and studying the mathematical laws of the outbreak of social software. The final round is divided into five major tracks: algebra and number theory, geometry and topology, analysis and equations, applied and computational mathematics, and combinatorics and probability, and focuses more on testing the contestants' knowledge reserves and professional abilities.

It is worth mentioning that the prize money for the competition is generous, with a prize pool of more than 4 million yuan, including a gold prize of 30,000 US dollars, a silver prize of 15,000 US dollars, a bronze prize of 80 million US dollars, and an excellent prize of 2,000 US dollars. In comparison, the prize money for world-renowned mathematics competitions is not high, such as the prize money for the Fields Medal winner is only 11,000 US dollars. For this reason, the Alibaba Mathematics Competition Organizing Committee explained that many contestants are in the stage of studying for a doctorate, and the prize money can subsidize their study needs, so that outstanding mathematical talents can receive practical rewards.

Mathematics is not just about numbers or equations. It is the foundation of all sciences and an indispensable foundation for the development of AI.

This year, the Alibaba Mathematics Competition also set up an AI Challenge for the first time, encouraging participants to use AI to conduct logical reasoning and answer test questions. The test papers submitted by AI participants will be manually graded and reproduced by the organizing committee, and the process will be scored based on the AI's understanding of the questions and the steps to solve the questions. Interestingly, the AI Challenge prohibits human substitution for test takers.

So what was the result of the "AI candidates"? Unfortunately, the participating AI team failed to reach the final qualifying score, with the highest score being only 34 points, 11 points short of the qualifying score, and missed the final competition. The top three were Tu Jinhao from Shanghai Jianping Middle School, the Agent Universe team from Southwest Jiaotong University, and the SuperCarryMan team from Renmin University of China.

The person in charge of the organizing committee said that this year's "AI candidates" have reached the average level of human players, but there is still a large gap between them and math masters. It is expected that they may be shortlisted for the finals next year, but the possibility of obtaining high scores is still not high.

"The 'closed-source Prompt' solution is still better than the 'open-source fine-tuning' solution on the table. Prompt sounds simple, but it can also be done brilliantly. As research on LLM deepens, Prompt will drive LLM to produce better results, which will be a highlight of future competitions." The person in charge believes that AI and humans each have their own advantages in solving math problems.

The advantages of AI are fast computing speed, no memory limitation, and the potential to encompass a vast amount of mathematical knowledge, and perhaps the ability to discover problem-solving ideas that humans have not discovered. However, humans will still have more flexible thinking and creativity, intuition, the ability to repeatedly ponder, and better at abstracting problems, and the ability to handle unstructured, multimodal inputs that are still challenging for AI. "AI is trained through human corpus, and humans are creative. Even if AI becomes more advanced, the two will always have their strengths and weaknesses, and AI and humans will probably be complementary rather than substitutive in the field of mathematics," he said.

Previously, AI has achieved some success in knowledge question answering, generating graphics and animations, programming, and relatively simple mathematics. The Alibaba Mathematical Competition hopes to provide everyone with a novel perspective by introducing AI, allowing them to see AI's pure abstract thinking, logical reasoning, and clever problem-solving capabilities in competitions.

Zhang Jianfeng, president of DAMO Academy, said that mathematics itself is very elegant, pure mathematics is close to philosophy, and applied mathematics is the unsung hero of scientific development. The progress of mathematics has promoted the development of many disciplines such as relativity, electromagnetism, information theory, cybernetics, and modern economics. "We will continue to hold the competition as always, and hope that more people will pay attention to and love mathematics."

It is reported that the final of this year's Alibaba Mathematical Competition will be held on June 22. Contestants can choose any consecutive 8 hours to answer within the period, and the winners will eventually share a prize of more than 4 million yuan.

Appendix: Some test questions from the 2024 Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition Preliminary Competition

1. Several students formed a group to travel to a city during the holiday. There are 6 towers in the city, and their locations are ABCDEF. After the students moved freely for a while, each student found that he could only see the four towers located at ABCD, but not the towers at E and E.

The positions of the students and the tower are considered as points on the same plane, and these points do not overlap with each other;

Any three points in ABCDEF are not collinear;

The only possibility of not being able to see the tower is that the view is blocked by other towers. For example, if a student's position P is collinear with AB, and A is on line segment PB, then the student cannot see the tower at B.

How many students can there be in this travel group at most?

2. Xiao Ming plays a fighter plane game. The initial score is 2. During the game, the score will decrease linearly over time. After the game starts, an enemy plane will appear on the screen at random intervals. When the enemy plane appears, Xiao Ming immediately operates and can instantly shoot down the opponent or be shot down by the opponent instantly. If he is shot down by the enemy plane, the game ends. If Xiao Ming shoots down the enemy plane, he will get 1.5 points, and can choose to exit the game immediately after shooting down the enemy plane, or continue the game. If you choose to continue the game, you must wait until the next enemy plane appears, and you cannot actively exit in the middle. The difficulty of the game continues to increase: for the nth enemy plane that appears, Xiao Ming has a probability of shooting down the opponent of ⁿ, and a probability of being shot down of 1-ⁿ, which is independent of the previous event. At any time, if the score drops to 0, the game ends automatically.

Question 1: If Xiao Ming is shot down in the game, his previous points will be retained. Then in order to maximize the mathematical expectation of the accumulated points at the end of the game, after which enemy plane should Xiao Ming actively end the game?

Question 2: Assuming that in the game, after Xiao Ming is shot down, his previously accumulated points will be reset to zero. Then in order to maximize the expected points at the end, Xiao Ming will also choose an optimal time to actively end the game. At the end of the game, which of the following options is closest to Xiao Ming's expected points at the end of the game?

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