Ryan's Repository of Random Reflections

The pace of progress in Artificial Intelligence is truly staggering. Every few months, it feels like we see new capabilities emerge that were recently considered science fiction. As someone fascinated by problem-solving, particularly in mathematics, I'm always curious to see how the latest AI models stack up against complex reasoning tasks. Recently, I got the chance to try out Google's  Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental , one of their most advanced models currently under development. Naturally, I decided to put it through its paces using some of the very math puzzles I shared on this blog back in 2016 . These aren't your standard textbook arithmetic problems; many require a degree of logical deduction, abstract thinking, or creative strategy – the kind of things that have traditionally been challenging for computers. I fed the problems to Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental yesterday, and honestly, I was blown away by the results. It solved  all  of them. Even more impressively, it n...

2024 was an exciting season for beat the streak, with several streaks appearing unstoppable and one player even breaking to 50 game barrier.  This year was also quite good for me, and while my longest streak was only 20 games, my model was noticeably better than in prior seasons.  In this blog post, I'll share some high level statistics about my model in the 2024 season.  Number of Games with At Least One Hit First we will ignore the model and just look at the outcomes over time.  In the figure below, we plot the % Games with Hit across all starting hitters from the year 2000 - 2025.  We see that offensive production is overall not what it used to be, although there was a nice uptick since the all-time low in 2020 and 2021.  With lower offensive production, it is harder to beat the streak, both because it is harder for an individual batter to get a hit, and because each batter gets less opportunities in a single game.  The uptick is caused by the h...