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I feel like I've noticed you you making the same comment 12 places in this thread -- incorrectly misrepresenting the difficulty of this tournament and ultimately it comes across as a bitter ex.

Here's an example problem 5:

Let a1,a2,…,an be distinct positive integers and let M=max⁡1≤i<j≤n.

Find the maximum number of pairs (i,j) with 1≤i<j≤n for which (ai +aj )(aj −ai )=M.

3 comments

What does max⁡1≤i<j≤n mean? Wouldn't M always be j?

Guessing it should be M = max_{⁡1≤i<j≤n} ai+aj or some other function M = max_{⁡1≤i<j≤n} f(ai,aj).

Where did you get this? Don't see it on the 2025 problem set and now I wanna see if I have the right answer

I asked chatGPT. However it's saying that's 2022 problem 5, however that seems to be clearly wrong... Moreover I can't find that problem anywhere so I don't know if it's a hallucination or something from it's training set that isn't on the internet....

Okay, please don't post ChatGPT output as fact without verification or at least stating where you got it.

Butlerian jihad can’t come soon enough lol

Hence proofs as I've stated.

Go up to Andrew Wiles and say, "Meh, NBD, it was just a proof."

IMO questions and Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's last theorem are two vastly different things. One is far harder than the other and the effort he put in and thinking needed is something very few can do. He also did some other fascinating work that I couldn't hope to understand fully. There is a gulf between FLT and IMO types of proofs.