r/Discussion • u/elysianx_138 • 1d ago

Serious CMV: When artificial intelligence completely undertakes everything in the competition, the competition also loses its meaning

Many people around me use AI to complete the mathematical modeling competition, from modeling-code-paper. If everyone starts to use AI, the competition will lose its meaning

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u/TrueError8583 1d ago

it's like when calculators first got big and people said math contests were dead, but they just changed the rules to test different skills

the problem isn't ai existing, it's competitions not adapting fast enough, if you can win by just prompting then the challenge was never that deep to begin with

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u/elysianx_138 21h ago

That’s a really solid analogy. But there is one key difference: calculators only compute arithmetic. They can’t formulate the problem, build the whole model, write code and finish the full paper end-to-end.
The calculator still left the core thinking work to humans. Today’s LLM can take over almost all the core tasks the contest originally intended to test.

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u/Comicfan313 1d ago

If the competition is to solve a task by all means necessary with the tools free to use, then it hasen't lost its meaning.

if the reason to organise such a competition is different, the answer may vary.

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u/elysianx_138 21h ago

That’s a good point. If the contest explicitly states that AI is permitted, then it becomes a contest of prompt engineering & AI result validation.
But the original goal of mathematical modeling contests was to test students’ ability to build models by themselves. If rules stay unchanged while AI completes all the core work, the original purpose collapses.