> It is extremely difficult to come up with truly original questions, [...]

No, that's actually really easy. What's hard is coming up with original questions of a specific level of difficulty. And that's what you need for a competition.

To elaborate: it's really easy to find lots and lots of elementary, unsolved questions. But it's not clear whether you can actually solve them or how hard solving them is, so it's hard to judge the performance of LLMs on them.

> It it interesting that this rule has gone completely out of the window in the age of LLMs.

No, it hasn't.