MOG results released

The results for the aforementioned Mathematical Olympiad for Girls have now been released on Joseph Myers’ website. There are impressively many excellent scores, as compared with previous years, including some names previously unknown to us. Hence, the competition has more than fulfilled its goal, which was to seek out mathematical talent and form a preliminary squad of prospective EGMO team members.

The profusion of high scores (19 people scoring $\geq 70 \%$ compared with 2 last year and 1 in the inaugural year) are partially a result of the wider dispersion of this exam, and highlights that the previous machinery* for selecting candidates may have been suboptimal. However, the proportion of schools entering this competition was not particularly large, so we can still do even better…

* Only the first round (a multiple-choice quiz called the SMC) is actually marked by a computer, although I hypothesised that it may be possible to generalise this in several decades’ time. We have software for recognising handwriting (even cursive script, which is a step beyond optical character recognition), processing natural language (such as Wolfram Alpha and Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU) and checking formal proofs (namely Coq and Isabelle). With some further developments in artificial intelligence, this might ultimately culminate in an automatic program for marking mathematical olympiads.