I was under the impression that IMO is conducted in an official "exam" capacity, on site and in a very formal setting. So I find it hard to believe _direct_ LLM usage would be a factor Then again - it very well could be a factor in the training and preparation? I imagine "Write me a prep document for the IMO" will surface all kinds of interesting things from the training set.

> And, of course, 35 is the same score claimed by AI systems from Google, OpenAI, and others.

This is the part of the quote your6 replying about.

You seemed to take "of course" as an implication that the contestants used LLMs, and that's why they got the same score as the LLMs.

I took it to mean: since this was the modal score, there seemed to be 35 points worth of significantly easier answers (relatively speaking) than the remaining points, so it's not a surprise that LLMs got the same easier bits right. (Though I doubt all contestants got their points on exactly the same answers.)

But it's certainly unclear what exactly the author meant.