March 14, 2026
CheatGPT goes to cram school
Mathematics Distillation Challenge – Equational Theories
A 10KB “cheat sheet” for baby AIs? Math world splits between hype, eye-rolls, and memes
TLDR: A new SAIR challenge dares the internet to pack 22M math facts into a 10KB “cheat sheet” to boost small AIs from 50% to ~60% on logic puzzles. Commenters split between excitement over compressing math knowledge and snark that it’s just prompt-engineering hype—yet everyone wants to peek at the crib notes.
Math’s latest stunt is basically giving AI a crib sheet. The new SAIR Foundation challenge asks the crowd to compress a mountain of math facts—22 million true/false results—into a tiny 10KB “cheat sheet” to help small, cheap AI models do better on logic-like puzzles. The founders say it’s like students distilling a semester into one page. The community? Split. Some cheer the “Polymath” vibes and love the open playground (competition page); others roll their eyes at the modest gains (from coin-flip 50% to 55–60%).
The hottest take: “This is Kaggle for prompts.” Skeptics warn of leaderboard gaming, overfitting to the test set, and “teaching to the exam.” Fans clap back that this tests whether knowledge can be compressed for smaller models—think “math flashcards for robots.” There’s mild side-eye at the organizer also being on the host’s board, plus a chorus grumbling that AI answers lack insight. But the memes are on fire: “CheatGPT,” “10KB to rule them all,” and “LLMs cramming before finals.” One commenter flexed that Mastodon saw it first and shared a better link, because of course they did. Love it or loathe it, this challenge turns math class into a reality show, and everyone’s watching to see if a tiny file can move the needle.
Key Points
- •A new challenge seeks to distill Equational Theories Project results into a compact cheat sheet to aid inexpensive AI models on universal algebra true-false tasks.
- •The Equational Theories Project used Lean and automated theorem provers to settle over 22 million true-false problems.
- •Small open-source models perform near chance (~50%) on these tasks, but tailored cheat sheets can raise accuracy to roughly 55%-60%.
- •Stage 1 limits cheat sheets to at most 10 KB and provides a playground with 1,200 public problems (1,000 easy, 200 hard).
- •The challenge is hosted by the SAIR Foundation, with motivation linked to a recent paper by Honda, Murakami, and Zhang.