3Blue1Brown's "Hardest Problem": Competition Math, Not New Theorems — E8 Intelligence Research

FINDING: 3Blue1Brown's "hardest problem" corpus centers on Putnam/IMO competition problems (notably 2011 IMO P2 "windmill" and a Putnam integral), plus the MATH benchmark (12,500 problems) — no single new theorem or constant is introduced; the content is pedagogical and meta-mathematical. MATH: - 2011 IMO Problem 2 (windmill): Given a finite set S of n≥2 points in the plane, no three collinear, a "windmill" is a line ℓ through a single point P∈S, rotating clockwise about P; when it hits another point Q∈S, Q becomes the new pivot. Claim: a pivot can be chosen so the windmill passes through every point of S infinitely often. Proof uses parity/invariant arguments on the number of points on each side of ℓ. - Putnam integral (3B1B video): a definite integral evaluated via symmetry/Feynman-style parameter differentiation, not a named constant. - MATH dataset: 12,500 problems across 7 subjects, 5 difficulty levels (1–5); difficulty defined by human solve-rate, not by any intrinsic constant. Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com