Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

codeforces.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 255 posts

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#141

Post by noosphr »

trhway wrote: post #140
noosphr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two days ago I talked to someone in water management about data centers. One of the big players wanted to build a center that consumed as much water as a medium town in semi arid bushland. A week before that it was a substation which would take a decade to source the transformers for. Before that it was buying closed down coal power plants. I don't know if we're in a bubble for model capabilities, but we are definite…

Getting well funded commercial demand is exactly how you undo it.

Not in three months. It will take years if not decades.

What happens when OpenAI and friends go bust because China is drowning in spare grid capacity and releasing sota open weights models like R1 every other week?

Every company building infrastructure for AI also goes out of business and we are in a worse position than we are now because instead of having a tiny industry building infrastructure at a level required to replace what has reached end of life we have nothing.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#142

Post by 77pt77 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #94
KallDrexx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to look closely at the details of how these models actually do these things. If you look at the details of how Google got gold at IMO, you'll see that AlphaGeometry only relies on LLMs for a very specific part of the whole system, and the LLM wasn't the core problem solving system in play. Most of AlphaGeometry is standard algorithms at play solving geometry problems using known constraints. When the a…

>This achievement is a significant advance over last year’s breakthrough result. At IMO 2024, AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof required experts to first translate problems from natural language into domain-specific languages, such as Lean, and vice-versa for the proofs. It also took two to three days of computation. This year, our advanced Gemini model operated end-to-end in natural language, producing rigorous mathemati…

3 days of computation is crazy and definitely not on par with human contestants.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#143

Post by NoahZuniga »

smokel wrote: post #53

The best thing of the ICPC is the first C, which stands for "collegiate". It means that you get to solve a set of problems with three persons, but with only one computer. This means that you have to be smart about who is going to spend time coding, thinking, or debugging. The time pressure is intense, and it really is a team sport. It's also extra fun if one of the team members prefers a Dvorak keyboard layout and vi…

Actually collegiate means that the contestants are in college.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#144

Post by chpatrick »

bgwalter wrote: post #117
asboans wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses… first, and quite obviously they have massive amounts of horsepower, which is kind of like giving a team of horses… many more horses. But also cars have an absolutely massive fuel capacity. Petrol is such an efficient store of chemical energy compared to hay and cars can store gallons of it. I…

The massive amounts of compute power is not the major issue. The major issue is unlimited amount of reference material. If a human can look up similar previous problems just as the "AI" can, it is a huge advantage. Syzygy tables in chess engines are a similar issue. They allow perfect play, and there is no reason why a computer gets them and a human does not (if you compare humans against chess engines). Humans have…

Humans are allowed to look up and learn from as many previous problems as they want before the competition. The AI is also trained on many previous problems before the competition. What's the difference?

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#145

Post by modeless »

qwertox wrote: post #131
modeless wrote: post #14

More information on OpenAI's result (which seems better than DeepMind's) from the X thread: > our OpenAI reasoning system got a perfect score of 12/12 > For 11 of the 12 problems, the system’s first answer was correct. For the hardest problem, it succeeded on the 9th submission. Notably, the best human team achieved 11/12. > We had both GPT-5 and an experimental reasoning model generating solutions, and the experimen…

> it succeeded on the 9th submission What's the judgement here? Was it within the allotted time, or just a "try as often as you need to"?

It was within the allotted time. If I'm reading the scoreboard correctly [edit: I wasn't], the human teams typically submitted dozens or hundreds of attempts at each problem.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#146

Post by bgwalter »

chpatrick wrote: post #144
bgwalter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive amounts of compute power is not the major issue. The major issue is unlimited amount of reference material. If a human can look up similar previous problems just as the "AI" can, it is a huge advantage. Syzygy tables in chess engines are a similar issue. They allow perfect play, and there is no reason why a computer gets them and a human does not (if you compare humans against chess engines). Humans have…

Humans are allowed to look up and learn from as many previous problems as they want before the competition. The AI is also trained on many previous problems before the competition. What's the difference?

Deleted, because the "AI" geniuses and power users pointed out that Tao does not have a point. You can get this one to -4 as well, since that seems to be the primary pleasure for "AI" one armed bandit users.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#147

Post by OtherShrezzing »

amluto wrote: post #59

I've contemplated this a bit, and I think I have a bit of an unconventional take: First, this is really impressive. Second, with that out of the way, these models are not playing the same game as the human contestants, in at least two major regards. First, and quite obviously, they have massive amounts of compute power, which is kind of like giving a human team a week instead of five hours. But the models that are co…

The human teams also get limited to one computer shared between 3 people. The models have access to an effectively unbounded number of computers.

My argument does feel a bit like the “Watson doesn’t need to physically push the button” equivalents from when that system beat Jeopardy for the first time. I assume 5 hours on a single high-end Mac would probably still be enough compute in the near future.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#148

Post by kevinwang »

modeless wrote: post #145
qwertox wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it succeeded on the 9th submission What's the judgement here? Was it within the allotted time, or just a "try as often as you need to"?

It was within the allotted time. If I'm reading the scoreboard correctly [edit: I wasn't], the human teams typically submitted dozens or hundreds of attempts at each problem.

For problems that human teams eventually get correct, they seem to have submitted mostly 1 time -- occasionally 2 or 3. For problems that they did not get correct, there are some problems with up to 16 submissions.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#149

Post by patrickhogan1 »

This is impressive.

Here is the published 2025 ICPC World Finals problemset. The "Time limit: X seconds" printed on each ICPC World Finals problem is the maximum runtime your program is allowed. If any judged run of your program takes longer than that, the submission fails, even if other runs finish in time.

https://worldfinals.icpc.global/problems/2025/finals/problem...

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#150

Post by modeless »

kevinwang wrote: post #148
modeless wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was within the allotted time. If I'm reading the scoreboard correctly [edit: I wasn't], the human teams typically submitted dozens or hundreds of attempts at each problem.

For problems that human teams eventually get correct, they seem to have submitted mostly 1 time -- occasionally 2 or 3. For problems that they did not get correct, there are some problems with up to 16 submissions.

Ah, I see I was in fact reading it wrong. So 9 is definitely an unusual but not unprecedented number of submissions.
Post reply on HN