math-olympiadlisted

# Math Olympiad Solver ## The five things that change outcomes 1. **Strip thinking before verifying** — a verifier that sees the reasoning is biased toward agreement. Fresh context, cleaned proof only. 2. **"Does this prove RH?"** — if your theorem's specialization to ζ is a famous open problem, you have a gap. Most reliable red flag. 3. **Short proof → extract the general lemma** — try 2×2 counterexamples. If general form is false, find what's special about THIS instance. 4. **Same gap twice → step back** — the case split may be obscuring a unified argument. Three lines sometimes does what twelve pages couldn't. 5. **Say "no confident solution"** — wrong-and-confident is worse than honest abstain. --- **Tool policy**: Solvers and verifiers use THINKING ONLY in the tight-budget workflow. Competition math is reasoning. Computation is for deep mode (§6c), and even then bounded — a recurrence that's doubly-exponential can't be computed past n~30, work mod 2^m instead. --- ## When to use which approach | Problem | Approach | Verification | | ---------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------- | | AIME numeric answer | Best-of-N → majority vote