This is a short blog post on the FrontierMath benchmark, a set of lots of difficult math problems with easily verifiable answers. Just to be clear, everything written here is my own thoughts and doesn’t necessarily reflect the intention of any collaborators.

When you’re setting a problem for a competition like the IMO or Putnam, three properties that are often considered desirable are:

1. It should require creative insight. Competitions avoid problems that are too similar to existing ones or too easily solved by simply applying standard textbook techniques. You want the problems to really feel different and force the solver to feel like they came up with a new idea to solve it. This is sort of what the spirit of math olympiads is about.

2. It should not take a lot of implementation, i.e. once a set of key ideas has been identified, actually carrying out the …

This post has now become a PDF handout on my website.