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Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

arstechnica.com

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Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#11

Post by lovich »

hyperhello wrote: post #6
burkaman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://atcoder.jp/contests/awtf2025heuristic/tasks/awtf2025...

I'm at a complete loss to discern why this would be a useful task to solve. It seems like the equivalent of elementary schoolers saying "OK, if you're so smart, what's 9,203,278,023 times 3,333,300,209?"

I feel like if that question was asked when calculators were invented, and someone was claiming humans were still better at arithmetic than machines, that it would be appropriate.

I was surprised reading through this problem that the machine solved it well at all.

I get that it’s a leet code style question but it’s got a lot of specifics and I assumed the corpus of training data on optimizing this type of problem was several orders of magnitude too small to train an LLM on and have good results.

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#12

Post by nuifldpei »

I despise the company that competed, but I feel obligated to acknowledge that headline buries the lede that their bot got SECOND place, and their 2nd place was closer to first than 3rd was to 2nd.

Are the submissions available online without needing to become a member of AtCoder?

I want to see what these 'heuristic' solutions look like.

Is it just that the ai precomputed more states and shoved their solutions in as the 'heuristic' or did it come up with novel, more broad, heuristics? Did the human and ai solutions have overlapping heuristics?

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#13

Post by margalabargala »

hyperhello wrote: post #6
burkaman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://atcoder.jp/contests/awtf2025heuristic/tasks/awtf2025...

I'm at a complete loss to discern why this would be a useful task to solve. It seems like the equivalent of elementary schoolers saying "OK, if you're so smart, what's 9,203,278,023 times 3,333,300,209?"

It's more the equivalent of "why would anyone race the 400m on a standard track, you just wind up back where you started!"

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#14

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

esseph wrote: post #10
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #2

I'm old enough to remember being taught the Ballad of John Henry...

The article mentions it...

Yup. I was talking about how they taught it to us, in school. It actually had an emotional place in my heart. For some reason, I found the story compelling.

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#18

Post by ge96 »

burkaman wrote: post #4
317070 wrote: post #3

Does someone know the problem/challenge being solved?

https://atcoder.jp/contests/awtf2025heuristic/tasks/awtf2025...

Damn I feel exhausted reading that problem, seeing the input/output... what. Granted I skimmed it for like 20 seconds but yeah.
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