Chinese fashion student outsmarts AI teams to reach finals of Alibaba maths competition
- It was the first time Alibaba’s maths competition has allowed AI to assist with solving questions, with more than 563 teams from around the world participating
A 17-year-old student majoring in fashion design, who is self-taught in maths, beat all the artificial intelligence (AI) teams to get into the finals of the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition, according to the final list issued by the organiser, Alibaba’s DAMO Academy.
Just over 800 competitors with an average age of 22 qualified for the final competition to be held on June 22. The majority of finalists are students, including those from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge University as well as Peking University and Tsinghua University.
Jiang Ping, who studies fashion design at Jiangsu vocational school and spent two years studying maths on her own, became the surprise black horse. Jiang ranked 12th place in the final list and earned 93 points. She said she wants to prove “girls can also learn maths well”.
The winners of the final competition will share prizes of more than 4 million yuan (US$552,120).
This is the first time that Alibaba’s open-to-all maths competition has allowed AI to assist with solving questions, and it attracted more than 563 teams from different universities and companies around the world. More than half of the participants were born after 2000, according to the DAMO Academy.
“AI challenges are a meaningful attempt, which can help us to break through the limitation of AI’s capability,” said Yin Wotao, the head of the decision intelligence lab of DAMO Academy and a committee member of the competition.
