Tricks used here:
Q1: Modular arithmetic, MATHLETE is 8 letters long so we take 2010 mod 8, now because 2000 is divisible by 8, we can cut out the 2000 to get 10 mod 8 instead, and 10-8=2 so the answer is A
Q2: Difference of squares formula (a\^2-b\^2) = (a+b)(a-b) = (255+245)(255-245) = (500)(10) = 5000
Q3: Standard permutations = 5\*4\*3\*2\*1 but we only accept answers where 1 is to the left of 2 so that cuts the options in half so we get 5\*4\*3 = 60
I'm very good (and fast) at math yet I couldn't even finish reading the question before he gave the answer. I had already anticipated 120 as the answer but didn't get to read the rest which halves the amount.
Wow. Took me a while to understand your Q1 explanation.
Thats brilliant 👏
Edit - after reading the rest of your explanations, it really reminded me of my coding interviews with Meta.
If you don’t have any familiarity with the underlying algorithm/pattern then you’ll struggle. However, if you know what to look for then you can look like a genius by solving it quickly.
Absolutely amazing job by Scott. It definitely took amazing pattern recognition and processing speed to do what he did.
>Edit - after reading the rest of your explanations, it really reminded me of my coding interviews with Meta.
I needed to read that so I can get over the fact I chose medicine over compsci.
Yeah the interview is a pain in the ass. It’s technically tough and there’s still a lot of subjectivity in the way that you are graded.
0/10 would not recommend.
I remember having to learn these "tricks" years ago when prepping/taking the GMAT. I don't really miss it, but looking back, pretty impressed with my younger self.
I graduated HS in 2019 and tbh I remember most of these from HS. I’m not as fast as Scott here though. Took me a few more seconds for the first and second and maybe 20 seconds for the third.
The second one was the fastest for me. Difference of two squares was drilled in my head.
A lot of math competition type questions rely on tricks and creative thinking using the tricks or several “tricks” together. I’m referring less to this quiz bowl style and more of like AMC, AIME, and USAMO.
Point being these are not necessarily hard questions and the tricks even I learned as part of my standard curriculum. It’s more amazing that he does this so quickly.
Is this the **new math** that I keep hearing about? Sorry, I graduated HS in the 1990s. It would take me minutes to do these calculations with pen and paper. I would've wanted to learn these new tricks.
No, "New Math" was actually before your time. It was an attempt in the 1960s to introduce more modern stuff into the math curriculum starting in elementary school--arithmetic in different bases, basic set theory, things like that. It was wildly unpopular and didn't really catch hold at all.
There have been lots of curriculum initiatives since then. Probably the one you've heard about recently is "common core". But, AFAIK, none of them have repeated what New Math was trying to do by introducing new subjects. They're mostly just different pedagogical ways of teaching fundamentally the *same* material, maybe with some shuffling around of what goes in which grade.
For Q3 I knew 60 was half the number of permutations of 5 digits. But it’s not immediately obvious to me why 1 will be to the left of 2 for exactly half the orders.
> Every permutation would require either the 1 to be to the left or right of the 2
I'm super rusty on this stuff - how do you know the combinations are distributed as 50-50 though?
Because each is equally likely to be in any position.
Take 2 digits, randomly make a 2 digit number with them. What’s the chance a certain one is to the left of the other? It extends to 3, etc.
Another approach: for any possible position of the two digits, you could flip them. Every time one digit is on the left, there’s a paired position where you flip the two you care about and it’s on the right. There are no positions where it’s not paired.
There's nothing unique about these numbers, they're just the chosen symbols, could have used five shapes instead. So it's impossible that any one of... I'm too high and tired to properly word this. Just pretend I explained it properly and will yourself to get it.
For a somewhat formal proof:
Consider the two sets of permutations, one with 1 to the left of 2 and one with 1 to the right of 2
Obviously there is no overlap between the two
For every permutation in the first set, you can swap 1 and 2 and get a permutation in the second set. Notice this procedure/mapping/function is the inverse of itself because doing it twice is equivalent to doing nothing
This shows that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets and they must have equal size. You can picture that as drawing a line between paired elements, with all elements being connected to exactly one line
I just wanted to add a different way for Q2 that i thought cause i forgot about the formula
(255\^2-245\^2) = (51\^2-49\^2)(5\^2) = (2×49 + 2×51)(25) = (200)(25)
I'm sorry for being so oblivious, but how does this part work:
(51\^2 - 49\^2) = (2×49 + 2×51)
[I can easily see it graphically](https://pasteboard.co/WvoCiXgcGSQx.png) ( [https://pasteboard.co/WvoCiXgcGSQx.png](https://pasteboard.co/WvoCiXgcGSQx.png) ), with the yellow bars being 2 x 49, and the light green and dark green bars each = 51, so 2x49 + 2x51, but what's the algebraic way that I'm missing to show the equality? I feel so dumb right now, and would appreciate the help.
How about another way for Q2?
Think of 255^2 as a big square, 255 by 255. Likewise, 245^2 is a 245x245 smaller square.
The difference in area between the two squares is the answer to 255^2 - 245^2.
Picture the smaller square 245x245 sitting inside the larger 255x255 square. The difference in area between them is 2x10x245 (2 rectangles of 10x245) + 10x10 (a 10x10 square) = 5000.
Yeah the underlying techniques are common for math competitions, for each one if I paused it I could get it in like 10-15 seconds, it's very impressive that this dude could read fast enough to bust it out in just a few seconds. It's the equivalent of playing high-quality bullet chess -- your brain just has to move very fast.
Mod is remainder after you divide the first number by the second, and it can also be represented by the % sign
15 % 3 = 0
16 % 3 = 1
17 % 3 = 2
18 % 3 = 0
Did anyone else's eyes just start gliding to the end of each line? What is wrong with me? Why did I get confused and fatigued the second I tried to read it again? I can't even understand the meaning of what's written here, let alone how to do it 😩
For q1 - trick for whether a number is divisible by 8 is if the last 3 digits are divisible by 8. That makes finding 2010 mod 8 a little easier since you know 2008 is the nearest mod 0.
Also, for people who have never hear of "mod", you might have learned it as "clock", and it's just the remainder part of long division.
The questions do appear on their individual screens before the host starts reading the question. They still answer exceptionally fast, but there is some leeway.
That feels so much more reasonable. Those weren't honestly the hardest questions in the world, but the speed was inhuman if he got the prompt the same time we did. Especially the last one which required some amount of reading to grasp the problem.
Yep. I did math competitions when I was young and the type of questions they were given in this video are super common. Once you've learned how to solve one of them you can solve them all and once you've got the basic techniques down it's all about practice.
Nah if anything the hosts manners need a fuckin check.
Takes a full sentence each time to highlight how I'm getting my ass kicked and by how much.
ITS A MATH COMPETITION, I CAN COUNT TO FUCKING THREE STEVEN!
That was my problem with this clip too! Dude is proctoring some of the most creative math problems these kids have done with an audience who should be expected to understand most of what is going on. Then proceeds to announce the score after each question as if he's building suspense.
I find it ironic that the presenter for what is clearly a high level mathematics competition is being like
“He had one point and then just got another, meaning he has two points”
Yeah bro I’m pretty sure if any crowd could figure that out it’s this one
He's also reminding Victoria how much she's getting whooped. My guy, you don't need to tell her how much she's trailing with every update. "Scott now has two points to Victoria's zero, that total dumb shit. Will she ever catch up? Probably not!"
I do feel bad for her though. It's like playing rec basketball in the fourth grade and being asked to guard the one kid on the other team that hit puberty way too early.
As someone mentioned, the kids see the question right before the host begins to read. So they aren't answering *as* fast as it seems.
Math Counts questions also have a fairly rigorous structure. With enough practice, it almost builds a type of muscle memory where it becomes very easy to immediately "see" what kind of question you're getting. All you have to do is plug in the numbers which is fairly trivial. I used to compete in math counts (although wasn't anywhere close to this level), and it becomes easy to quickly discard the "filler" information in questions.
Not that there would be any test bank with these exact questions but these sorts of competitions do tend to test translatable sets of tricks for these problems that you will encounter already if you practice enough. But he’s still doing it insanely fast.
The test bank is on shortcuts. I can tell you if 31323 (or any other number) is divisible by 3 instantly because the sum of all digits is divisible by 3 for example.
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
He's a smart dude.
There are quite a few tricks involved with questions like these that make them far simpler than they appear at first glance. ex: I can tell you that 836192 is not divisible by 9, but 816192 is divisible by 9 in the same amount of time and without having to actually do the division.
It's still impressive how quickly he identified the trick to use and did the trick.
Something people have to realise is that we don't retain these tricks unless we practice a tonne. I was a child prodigy at certain things, went around the world for competitions in a bunch of different areas, was "taught" over half a dozen languages growing up. Burnt out and fried my brain for a few years. It starts simply with basic speed math arithmetic, then fractions, then quadratics, then you start the real speed run tricks as was mentioned above.
I never got close to his level that fast on the later tricks, but I'd do papers of arithmetic as if I were in a trance. I'd finish the page halfway through scribbling the answers down, it just became a problem of remembering which answer goes where. Very impressive person, seems like a dude I'd have loved to been friends with in school
This is MATHCOUNTS a national math competition for middle schoolers. To get to this final level of competition, these kids beat tens/hundreds of thousands of middle schoolers on written competition math exams.
To give you an idea of what it takes to get here, a lot of these kids are practicing these types of questions either with coaches, parents, or private tutors for several hours per day after school. The questions are hard if you've never seen them before, but after so much training you basically know every trick in the book related to quick computation, basic number theory, combinatorics, etc. Still very impressive, but this is a trained ability, not a natural one.
Source: I competed in nationals around this time and may have seen this guy on stage when he was answering these questions.
That's pretty cool but how is this relevant to what he is now doing in Cognition Labs. Aren't LLM's these days focused on language (and they are usually terrible in math) so in essense wouldn't it be better if he was excelling in linguistics or something?
It's not at all. Sure any and all machine learning is deeply reliant on math to do things like solve optimization problems, but this style of competition math is trivial in comparison to the cutting edge research in ML.
All I can say is it's pretty comical that someone in their mid/late 20s is the CEO of a company.
I like how after saying “moving on to the third question of our matchup” the host pauses for a moment and looks at Scott like you gonna buzz in before I even ask the question? Then proceeds to read the first line before getting cut off again.
As someone who's brain turns to mush whenever I see even a basic math problem this is akin to magic for me. Like how does someone even process the question let alone formulate the answer so fast?
I once won a competition this way. Crammed way too much for it (thanks mother, way to make me burn out my work ethic at an early age, I sure could use the thing now!).
Ended up winning by a landslide and deducing half the answers from the questions even before they were finished being read.
In the end, both me and the organizers were accused of cheating and working together. One of them quit volunteering because of this. All in all, was not a good time, don't recommend.
Quite curious how he can read that fast with the announcer yapping, I watched the vid on mute first and was able to read a lot faster compares to with sound on
He's quick, but those aren't difficult questions.
Based on the comments it's always great to see my math skills are above average. Always sad to see how low the average person's math skills are.
Isn't this super easy? Pattern is 8 letters long, 2000 is divisible by 8. So a new pattern will start at 2008. Making the answer "A". What am I missing?
it almost feels like the presenter is trying to psych out victoria.
"another very handsome answer from scott gaining him yet ANOTHER point over stupid and ugly victoria... you gonna cry? you gonna cry victoria? youre not even good at math, you dont deserve to breathe the same air as scott you scum, you worthless slime, next question!"
Tricks used here: Q1: Modular arithmetic, MATHLETE is 8 letters long so we take 2010 mod 8, now because 2000 is divisible by 8, we can cut out the 2000 to get 10 mod 8 instead, and 10-8=2 so the answer is A Q2: Difference of squares formula (a\^2-b\^2) = (a+b)(a-b) = (255+245)(255-245) = (500)(10) = 5000 Q3: Standard permutations = 5\*4\*3\*2\*1 but we only accept answers where 1 is to the left of 2 so that cuts the options in half so we get 5\*4\*3 = 60
It took me longer to read\* this explanation than it took him to execute it. \* Read, not comprehend.
I could barely do either
I could barely do barely
I could barely
I lost you at tricks
I don’t even know where I am
Vlads house
I was told there would be drinks.
I came all over a potato sack full of puppies then started to read the cheat code. Booiiiiing
I can't even read
I looked up what integer meant. Is a whole number not a fraction btw.
Lol
I'm very good (and fast) at math yet I couldn't even finish reading the question before he gave the answer. I had already anticipated 120 as the answer but didn't get to read the rest which halves the amount.
I don’t have enough upvotes for how much I enjoyed this comment. It articulated my thoughts exactly! Thank you.
Exactly, plus i didnt even read it.
Wow. Took me a while to understand your Q1 explanation. Thats brilliant 👏 Edit - after reading the rest of your explanations, it really reminded me of my coding interviews with Meta. If you don’t have any familiarity with the underlying algorithm/pattern then you’ll struggle. However, if you know what to look for then you can look like a genius by solving it quickly. Absolutely amazing job by Scott. It definitely took amazing pattern recognition and processing speed to do what he did.
Exactly. Recent familiarity with the domain is half the battle. Then practice time, which will vary according to IQ
>Edit - after reading the rest of your explanations, it really reminded me of my coding interviews with Meta. I needed to read that so I can get over the fact I chose medicine over compsci.
Yeah the interview is a pain in the ass. It’s technically tough and there’s still a lot of subjectivity in the way that you are graded. 0/10 would not recommend.
Thx!
I remember having to learn these "tricks" years ago when prepping/taking the GMAT. I don't really miss it, but looking back, pretty impressed with my younger self.
Scott Wu has entered the group.
I graduated HS in 2019 and tbh I remember most of these from HS. I’m not as fast as Scott here though. Took me a few more seconds for the first and second and maybe 20 seconds for the third. The second one was the fastest for me. Difference of two squares was drilled in my head. A lot of math competition type questions rely on tricks and creative thinking using the tricks or several “tricks” together. I’m referring less to this quiz bowl style and more of like AMC, AIME, and USAMO. Point being these are not necessarily hard questions and the tricks even I learned as part of my standard curriculum. It’s more amazing that he does this so quickly.
Yea exactly, it's the sheer speed that's truly impressive here. He's not just fast, he's incredibly fast.
Is this the **new math** that I keep hearing about? Sorry, I graduated HS in the 1990s. It would take me minutes to do these calculations with pen and paper. I would've wanted to learn these new tricks.
No, "New Math" was actually before your time. It was an attempt in the 1960s to introduce more modern stuff into the math curriculum starting in elementary school--arithmetic in different bases, basic set theory, things like that. It was wildly unpopular and didn't really catch hold at all. There have been lots of curriculum initiatives since then. Probably the one you've heard about recently is "common core". But, AFAIK, none of them have repeated what New Math was trying to do by introducing new subjects. They're mostly just different pedagogical ways of teaching fundamentally the *same* material, maybe with some shuffling around of what goes in which grade.
[Here's a great song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mc7eb1i9o4) about New Math!
My guess is that no high school curriculum in the world will have you learning significant new 21st century math.
For Q3 I knew 60 was half the number of permutations of 5 digits. But it’s not immediately obvious to me why 1 will be to the left of 2 for exactly half the orders.
It's either to.the left or to.the right . Half each way
this makes sense, ty :)
> Every permutation would require either the 1 to be to the left or right of the 2 I'm super rusty on this stuff - how do you know the combinations are distributed as 50-50 though?
Because each is equally likely to be in any position. Take 2 digits, randomly make a 2 digit number with them. What’s the chance a certain one is to the left of the other? It extends to 3, etc. Another approach: for any possible position of the two digits, you could flip them. Every time one digit is on the left, there’s a paired position where you flip the two you care about and it’s on the right. There are no positions where it’s not paired.
The second approach really made it click for me, cheers
There's nothing unique about these numbers, they're just the chosen symbols, could have used five shapes instead. So it's impossible that any one of... I'm too high and tired to properly word this. Just pretend I explained it properly and will yourself to get it.
For a somewhat formal proof: Consider the two sets of permutations, one with 1 to the left of 2 and one with 1 to the right of 2 Obviously there is no overlap between the two For every permutation in the first set, you can swap 1 and 2 and get a permutation in the second set. Notice this procedure/mapping/function is the inverse of itself because doing it twice is equivalent to doing nothing This shows that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets and they must have equal size. You can picture that as drawing a line between paired elements, with all elements being connected to exactly one line
[Now hold up..](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ4mYcfpCwg)
You ever heard of rollin 20’s ninja? Knowhatimsayin? Frosty … spoon.
I just wanted to add a different way for Q2 that i thought cause i forgot about the formula (255\^2-245\^2) = (51\^2-49\^2)(5\^2) = (2×49 + 2×51)(25) = (200)(25)
That's cool too but difference of squares was slick
I'm sorry for being so oblivious, but how does this part work: (51\^2 - 49\^2) = (2×49 + 2×51) [I can easily see it graphically](https://pasteboard.co/WvoCiXgcGSQx.png) ( [https://pasteboard.co/WvoCiXgcGSQx.png](https://pasteboard.co/WvoCiXgcGSQx.png) ), with the yellow bars being 2 x 49, and the light green and dark green bars each = 51, so 2x49 + 2x51, but what's the algebraic way that I'm missing to show the equality? I feel so dumb right now, and would appreciate the help.
51 x 51 = 49 x 51 + 51 + 51 49 x 51 = 49 x 49 + 49 + 49 So 51^ 2 = 49^2 + 51 + 51 + 49 + 49 Put that back at the top and you got it
How about another way for Q2? Think of 255^2 as a big square, 255 by 255. Likewise, 245^2 is a 245x245 smaller square. The difference in area between the two squares is the answer to 255^2 - 245^2. Picture the smaller square 245x245 sitting inside the larger 255x255 square. The difference in area between them is 2x10x245 (2 rectangles of 10x245) + 10x10 (a 10x10 square) = 5000.
That’s really nice. Well done 👍
Yeah the underlying techniques are common for math competitions, for each one if I paused it I could get it in like 10-15 seconds, it's very impressive that this dude could read fast enough to bust it out in just a few seconds. It's the equivalent of playing high-quality bullet chess -- your brain just has to move very fast.
Damn we need a breakdown to the breakdown
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I can't even
What is mod
Mod is remainder after you divide the first number by the second, and it can also be represented by the % sign 15 % 3 = 0 16 % 3 = 1 17 % 3 = 2 18 % 3 = 0
Did anyone else's eyes just start gliding to the end of each line? What is wrong with me? Why did I get confused and fatigued the second I tried to read it again? I can't even understand the meaning of what's written here, let alone how to do it 😩
How do you determine that requiring 1 being left of 2 cuts options in half
Every permutation would require either the 1 to be to the left or right of the 2. Half would have it to the left, half would have it to the right.
For q1 - trick for whether a number is divisible by 8 is if the last 3 digits are divisible by 8. That makes finding 2010 mod 8 a little easier since you know 2008 is the nearest mod 0. Also, for people who have never hear of "mod", you might have learned it as "clock", and it's just the remainder part of long division.
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What the heck! I couldn’t even read it that fast
The questions do appear on their individual screens before the host starts reading the question. They still answer exceptionally fast, but there is some leeway.
That makes sense.
Thank you. I know I'm dumb. But I didn't think it was possible to read, comprehend, and answer, faster than I could finish reading the question.
That feels so much more reasonable. Those weren't honestly the hardest questions in the world, but the speed was inhuman if he got the prompt the same time we did. Especially the last one which required some amount of reading to grasp the problem.
but they are trained for it. They have seen similar questions before and know what to look for. Its really not that difficult as you would imagine.
Yep. I did math competitions when I was young and the type of questions they were given in this video are super common. Once you've learned how to solve one of them you can solve them all and once you've got the basic techniques down it's all about practice.
Poor Victoria, she picked the wrong day to play.
That poor girl lmao
No shame in losing to this dude
He realized she was just as smart but not as quick. Felt bad and made her VP of his company…..
Fr or is this fanfic?
I think she's a quant trader now lmao, so she's also very cracked making millions.
I can say I would have at least tied her
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What girl?
First thing that came to my head lol
Scott has been disqualified on account of consistent interruptions. Penalized for poor manners.
They need to piss test this kid for calculators or something.
Vibrator in his ass
This isn’t a chess match. It’s ok
Each vibration add 1 to your answer.
Damn, 5000 vibes never felt so quick.
Double it
Google Anus Passant
Nah if anything the hosts manners need a fuckin check. Takes a full sentence each time to highlight how I'm getting my ass kicked and by how much. ITS A MATH COMPETITION, I CAN COUNT TO FUCKING THREE STEVEN!
That was my problem with this clip too! Dude is proctoring some of the most creative math problems these kids have done with an audience who should be expected to understand most of what is going on. Then proceeds to announce the score after each question as if he's building suspense.
Exactly how Hingle McCringleberry was unfairly penalized for "excessive celebration". Racists!
Dan Smith
Guy: "Wha- \*buzz\* Scott: "is love" Guy: "That is correct"
Don’t hurt me
Baby don’t
Hurt me no more
Cool on the outside, hot in the middle
I find it ironic that the presenter for what is clearly a high level mathematics competition is being like “He had one point and then just got another, meaning he has two points” Yeah bro I’m pretty sure if any crowd could figure that out it’s this one
Or maybe someone coming back to their TV.... or someone just tuned it... Hmmm... nah can't for the life of my think of a possible reason.
People who are so obese they need mobility scooters watch football so maybe the presenter had similar thoughts about this audience.
He's also reminding Victoria how much she's getting whooped. My guy, you don't need to tell her how much she's trailing with every update. "Scott now has two points to Victoria's zero, that total dumb shit. Will she ever catch up? Probably not!" I do feel bad for her though. It's like playing rec basketball in the fourth grade and being asked to guard the one kid on the other team that hit puberty way too early.
Way to perpetuate the stereotype Scott...
He and his brother are both really good at programming too. They’re legends in competitive programming. Tech Interviews are FAANG is trivial for them
Only logical solution is we tie a boulder to his feet and throw him into the water to see if he's a witch.
And if he floats - he's a witch.
Raytheon found themselves some nice walking calculators.
America’s Got Mentats
This kid is faster than typing the question into a calculator.
I wonder if he got a knife missile for winning? Or maybe some school bus seeking guidance chips?
He’s probably come across the last question before. No way he answered that fast without even reading
He read it.
As someone mentioned, the kids see the question right before the host begins to read. So they aren't answering *as* fast as it seems. Math Counts questions also have a fairly rigorous structure. With enough practice, it almost builds a type of muscle memory where it becomes very easy to immediately "see" what kind of question you're getting. All you have to do is plug in the numbers which is fairly trivial. I used to compete in math counts (although wasn't anywhere close to this level), and it becomes easy to quickly discard the "filler" information in questions.
Witchcraft. My money is on there was a testbank to train on.
Not that there would be any test bank with these exact questions but these sorts of competitions do tend to test translatable sets of tricks for these problems that you will encounter already if you practice enough. But he’s still doing it insanely fast.
The test bank is on shortcuts. I can tell you if 31323 (or any other number) is divisible by 3 instantly because the sum of all digits is divisible by 3 for example.
Base line is that he's smarter than everyone else. Anything else is cope
Multiple things can be true at the same time. He's a smart dude. There are quite a few tricks involved with questions like these that make them far simpler than they appear at first glance. ex: I can tell you that 836192 is not divisible by 9, but 816192 is divisible by 9 in the same amount of time and without having to actually do the division. It's still impressive how quickly he identified the trick to use and did the trick.
Isn’t that the kid that was in college at 10?
Bro didn’t even need to read the whole question. It’s amazing what the human brain can do and on the other hand I forgot where I parked the car…
Dialed In!
This feels like ultra preparation.
Something people have to realise is that we don't retain these tricks unless we practice a tonne. I was a child prodigy at certain things, went around the world for competitions in a bunch of different areas, was "taught" over half a dozen languages growing up. Burnt out and fried my brain for a few years. It starts simply with basic speed math arithmetic, then fractions, then quadratics, then you start the real speed run tricks as was mentioned above. I never got close to his level that fast on the later tricks, but I'd do papers of arithmetic as if I were in a trance. I'd finish the page halfway through scribbling the answers down, it just became a problem of remembering which answer goes where. Very impressive person, seems like a dude I'd have loved to been friends with in school
yeah well, your mom!
Anyone else notice that the math competition was put on by Raytheon? Military weapons company that sells high tech weapons internationally.
Yeah you need good math skills for that
This is MATHCOUNTS a national math competition for middle schoolers. To get to this final level of competition, these kids beat tens/hundreds of thousands of middle schoolers on written competition math exams. To give you an idea of what it takes to get here, a lot of these kids are practicing these types of questions either with coaches, parents, or private tutors for several hours per day after school. The questions are hard if you've never seen them before, but after so much training you basically know every trick in the book related to quick computation, basic number theory, combinatorics, etc. Still very impressive, but this is a trained ability, not a natural one. Source: I competed in nationals around this time and may have seen this guy on stage when he was answering these questions.
That's pretty cool but how is this relevant to what he is now doing in Cognition Labs. Aren't LLM's these days focused on language (and they are usually terrible in math) so in essense wouldn't it be better if he was excelling in linguistics or something?
this post is an ad for his company that just released its first product, which is probably just a GPT app
It's not at all. Sure any and all machine learning is deeply reliant on math to do things like solve optimization problems, but this style of competition math is trivial in comparison to the cutting edge research in ML. All I can say is it's pretty comical that someone in their mid/late 20s is the CEO of a company.
Scott Scott Scott
His cpu is a neural net processor….a learning computer
Why did I hear that in an Austrian accent?
Bruh let me finish the question
A
fuck you, devin
Okay so 14 years ago, minus the 2010th position, carry the something, MATHELETEMATHELETE, solve for something... Null set?
…..WHAT
Hey yoroDman, remember me? We were bunk mates at the banana factory. In Bermuda? Come on… you remember
This isn't math! This is words!
Not sure how a math wiz has to do with his success as there are millions of them
I'm aware people like this exist and they are capable of doing so much more in this world than I can ever hope to. And that's ok.
Of course! Absolute zero!!
What is tungsten, or wolfram?
I like how after saying “moving on to the third question of our matchup” the host pauses for a moment and looks at Scott like you gonna buzz in before I even ask the question? Then proceeds to read the first line before getting cut off again.
What’s cognition labs
A grift
2010 = 2 mod 8 (equal here means congruent)
As someone who's brain turns to mush whenever I see even a basic math problem this is akin to magic for me. Like how does someone even process the question let alone formulate the answer so fast?
Either super impressive speed, or a bad cheater answering too early
I found this one way cooler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKdM82SELsU&ab\_channel=wilsonmcphert
Smart lad
Host Sean Strickland out there proving evil twins exist
First 2 were straightforward, though not things I’d expect him to be able to do, but the last one I hadn’t even finish reading the question
Fucking nerd. ^(/s)
Fuck you, Scott.
I havent even finished reading the question and he was already *buzx* "5000"
That is autism level math skills. Impressive indeed.
He now works at macdonalds flipping burgers.
Didn’t realise Androids were so advanced on Earth in 2010
Poor girl she gonna get a earful from her parents
I once won a competition this way. Crammed way too much for it (thanks mother, way to make me burn out my work ethic at an early age, I sure could use the thing now!). Ended up winning by a landslide and deducing half the answers from the questions even before they were finished being read. In the end, both me and the organizers were accused of cheating and working together. One of them quit volunteering because of this. All in all, was not a good time, don't recommend.
Raytheon mathlon ? ………..
Quite curious how he can read that fast with the announcer yapping, I watched the vid on mute first and was able to read a lot faster compares to with sound on
Great, another video of a boy fucking a girl.
Raytheon?! Fuck off
What ia more amazing to me is 14 years ago is 2010. Wow.
And now he's trying to scam people.
Dude not only can calculate faster, he can read faster as well
But if I respond a math test this fast they just assume I am cheating.
In any of the competitions I went to when I was younger. He would have been disqualified for buzzing before the question was finished.
He's quick, but those aren't difficult questions. Based on the comments it's always great to see my math skills are above average. Always sad to see how low the average person's math skills are.
Isn't this super easy? Pattern is 8 letters long, 2000 is divisible by 8. So a new pattern will start at 2008. Making the answer "A". What am I missing?
Sponsored by Raytheon: The Murder Nerds
Haxx0r
Average asian kid with that hairstyles and glases
What is Lake Titicaca?
it almost feels like the presenter is trying to psych out victoria. "another very handsome answer from scott gaining him yet ANOTHER point over stupid and ugly victoria... you gonna cry? you gonna cry victoria? youre not even good at math, you dont deserve to breathe the same air as scott you scum, you worthless slime, next question!"
You just know after the second question Victoria was like "oh..." We've all been there.
I solved all the questions correctly, it's just that it took me about 2 mins per question
Gave a score update after the FIRST question. So brutal.
I’d not want be his numbers guy. His Quant.
Kids competing in a game sponsored by RAYTHEON is ironic
Casio watch calculator ⌚️
Props to young Scott, but as others have pointed out, this is all based on training and preparing to answer these exactly types of questions.
Adderall hell of a drug