Hello and welcome to a Tuesday edition of Cool Stuff Ride Home. On today's episode, Mathematicians

Struggle to Outsmart AI. Where's this all headed? We'll give you their opinion. Plus,

frog saunas offer amphibians down under a lifeline against a deadly fungus, which is in turn having an impact

on the surrounding ecosystem.

That and a quick look at this day in history coming up on cool stuff.

This article comes courtesy of author Lindy Chu and the Scientific American.

On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened.

Thirty of the world's most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, California,

with some coming from as far away as the UK.

The group's members faced off at a showdown with a reasoning chatbot

that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its mathematical medal.

After throwing professor-level questions at the bot for two days,

the researchers were stunned to discover it was capable of answering some of the world's hardest solvable problems.

Said Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia,

and a leader and judge at the meeting, quote, I have colleagues who literally said these models

are approaching mathematical genius, end quote. The chatbot in question is powered by

04 Mini, a so-called reasoning large language model, or LLM. It was trained by OpenAI to be capable

of making highly intricate deductions. Google's equivalent, Gemini 2.5 Flash, has similar

abilities. Like the LLMs that powered earlier versions of chat GPT, O4-Mini learns to predict the next word in a sequence.

Compared with those earlier LLMs, however, 04-Mini at its equivalents are lighter weights,

more nimble models that train on specialized data sets with stronger reinforcement from humans.

The approach leads to a chatbot capable of diving much deeper into complex problems

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