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

Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#21

Post by TrackerFF »

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?"

Say you have a bunch of warehouse robots, some which work on different sections in the warehouse. Maybe one section has less things to do, while another section has more things to do - and thus needs more help. So you need to move a bunch of robots there, in groups.

Something like that.

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#22

Post by shoguse72 »

chmod775 wrote: post #5

Ten hours is a decent amount of time, so I'm not too surprised the human won. LLMs don't really tend to improve the longer they get to chew on a problem (often the opposite in fact). The LLM was probably getting nowhere trying to improve after the first few minutes.

> The LLM was probably getting nowhere trying to improve after the first few minutes.

How did you come to that conclusion from the contents of the article?

The final scores are all relatively close. How could that happen if the ai was floundering the whole time? Just a good initial guess?

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#23

Post by coldtea »

shoguse72 wrote: post #22
chmod775 wrote: post #5

Ten hours is a decent amount of time, so I'm not too surprised the human won. LLMs don't really tend to improve the longer they get to chew on a problem (often the opposite in fact). The LLM was probably getting nowhere trying to improve after the first few minutes.

> The LLM was probably getting nowhere trying to improve after the first few minutes. How did you come to that conclusion from the contents of the article? The final scores are all relatively close. How could that happen if the ai was floundering the whole time? Just a good initial guess?

>How could that happen if the ai was floundering the whole time? Just a good initial guess?

Yes, that and marginal improvements over it.

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#24

Post by coldtea »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14
esseph wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, millions did, that's why it's a classic!

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#25

Post by flanbiscuit »

so many things

First, there's a world coding championship?! Of course there is. There's a competition for anything these days.

Why is he exhausted?

> The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted."

> ... noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive."

oh! That's a lot.

> beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI ...

> On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as "Psyho"), a former OpenAI employee,

Interesting that he used to work there.

> Dębiak won 500,000 yen

JPY 500,000 -> USD 3367.20 -> EUR 2889.35

I'm guessing it's more about the clout than it is about the payment, because that's not a lot of money for the effort spent

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#27

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

coldtea wrote: post #24
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, millions did, that's why it's a classic!

I suspect it may not be taught, anymore, though.

I seem to encounter cultural milestones, that are no longer there, every day.

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#28

Post by hungmung »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #25

so many things First, there's a world coding championship?! Of course there is. There's a competition for anything these days. Why is he exhausted? > The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted." > ... noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive." oh! That's a lot. > beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI ... > On Wedn…

> I'm guessing it's more about the clout than it is about the payment

Yeah I'm not in tech but I've seen his handle like 3 times today already, so he's definitely got recognition.

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#29

Post by magicalist »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #25

so many things First, there's a world coding championship?! Of course there is. There's a competition for anything these days. Why is he exhausted? > The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted." > ... noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive." oh! That's a lot. > beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI ... > On Wedn…

> I'm guessing it's more about the clout than it is about the payment

to be fair he also said

> "Honestly, the hype feels kind of bizarre," Dębiak said on X. "Never expected so many people would be interested in programming contests."

Re: Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship

#30

Post by satyrun »

chmod775 wrote: post #5

Ten hours is a decent amount of time, so I'm not too surprised the human won. LLMs don't really tend to improve the longer they get to chew on a problem (often the opposite in fact). The LLM was probably getting nowhere trying to improve after the first few minutes.

I would think the LLM though is not trying one solution for 10 hours like a human.

I would assume the LLM is trying an inhuman number of solutions and the best one was #2 in this contest.

Impressive by the human winner but good luck on that in 2026.

Post reply on HN