Bratislava's Grösslingová Gymnasium can proudly present itself as the most successful team of this year's MATHING Internet mathematics competition. Thanks to their performance, the students there beat more than two hundred other teams from all over the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The competition has been organised for seventeen years by the Institute of Mathematics at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of Brno University of Technology.

A total of 1445 high school students from 82 Czech and 21 Slovak schools participated in 214 teams. "The evaluation of almost fifteen hundred submitted examples required the work of sixteen evaluators," said Viera Štoudková Růžičková from the Institute of Mathematics, one of the organisers of the competition.

The MATHING competition was held for the seventeenth time, the Institute of Mathematics continues to maintain the long tradition of the online mathematical competition. Students can take help from any source of information, including artificial intelligence, which is growing in use, but not always to the advantage of the competitors.

"It turns out that AI assistance is not very helpful, perhaps quite the opposite. Instead of trying to figure out the solution themselves, some participants wasted time trying to generate the correct solution using AI. However, the AI does not have logical thinking skills and thus usually generates solutions that are wrong, incomprehensible and illogical. Some of them contain the occasional correct idea or calculation, so it is possible to be inspired and develop the idea appropriately, but in that case one has to critically evaluate what is applicable. It seems that most of the participants from among high school students are not yet capable of this," adds Štoudková Růžičková.

Congratulations to the winners and to everyone who managed to crack this year's tricky exercises!