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Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

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Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#211

Post by aiiotnoodle »

bjackman wrote: post #87
pvalue005 wrote: post #27

I suspect this was released by Anthropic as a DDOS attack on other AI companies. I prompted 'how do we solve this challenge?' into gemini cli in a cloned repo and it's been running non-stop for 20 minutes :)

Lately with Gemini CLI / Jules it doesn't seem like time spent is a good proxy for difficulty. It has a big problem with getting into loops of "I am preparing the response for the user. I am done. I will output the answer. I am confident. Etc etc". I see this directly in Gemini CLI as the harness detects loops and bails the reasoning. But I've also just occasionally seen it take 15m+ to do trivial stuff and I suspect…

I've noticed using antigravity and vscode, Gemini 3 pro often comes back with model too busy or something like that and basically 500s.

Seems like capacity because it works a lot better late at night.

I don't see the same with the claude models in antigravity.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#212

Post by lukah »

abra0 wrote: post #180

This is a really fun problem! I suggest anyone who likes optimization in a very broad sense to try their hand at it. Might be the most fun I've had while interviewing. I had to spend a week-worth of evenings on it to fully scratch the itch, and I managed to get 1112 cycles. But that was mostly manual, before the current crop of agentic models (clopus 4.5, gpt5.2). I wonder how far you can RalphWiggum it!

I've never heard AI-assisted coding referred to as "RalphWiggum"ing a problem, and now I will have to use that always. Thank you.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#214

Post by woadwarrior01 »

mettamage wrote: post #203
lawrencechen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

codex cli + gpt-5-2-codex-xhigh got to 1606 with the prompt "beat 1487 cycles. go." ~53 minutes.

Wow, is gpt-5-2-codex-xhigh really that good in general? Is this the 200$ per month version?

gpt-5.2-codex xhigh with OpenAI codex on the $20/month plan got to 1526 cycles with OP's prompt for me. Meanwhile claude code with Opus 4.5 on the team premium plan ($150/month) gave up with a bunch of contrived excuses at 3433 cycles.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#215

Post by usgroup »

lukah wrote: post #212
abra0 wrote: post #180

This is a really fun problem! I suggest anyone who likes optimization in a very broad sense to try their hand at it. Might be the most fun I've had while interviewing. I had to spend a week-worth of evenings on it to fully scratch the itch, and I managed to get 1112 cycles. But that was mostly manual, before the current crop of agentic models (clopus 4.5, gpt5.2). I wonder how far you can RalphWiggum it!

I've never heard AI-assisted coding referred to as "RalphWiggum"ing a problem, and now I will have to use that always. Thank you.

https://awesomeclaude.ai/ralph-wiggum

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#216

Post by am17an »

woof wrote: post #161
tmp-127853716 wrote: post #108

[flagged]

"1) Python is unreadable." Would you prefer C or C++? "2) AI companies are content with slop and do not even bother with clear problem statements." It's a filter. If you don't get the problem, you'll waste their time. "3) LOC and appearance matter, not goals or correctness." The task was goal+correctness. "4) Anthropic must be a horrible place to work at." Depends on what you do. For this position it's probably one o…

1) Python is unreadable." Would you prefer C or C++?

> Unironically, yes. Unless I never plan to look at that code again

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#217

Post by rellfy »

piokoch wrote: post #210
tayo42 wrote: post #55

I wonder if the Ai is doing anything novel? Or if it's like a brute force search of applying all types of existing optimizations that already exist and have been written about.

How something that generates next token, given a list of previous tokens, can do something novel?

By that same logic, humans would not be able to do anything novel either.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#218

Post by LouisSayers »

lbreakjai wrote: post #70

I consider myself rather smart and good at what I do. It's nice to have a look at problems like these once in a while, to remind myself of how little I know, and how much closer I am to the average than to the top.

It's the type of thing you'd be exposed to in a computer science degree - operating systems / compilers.

Always room to learn in software :)

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#220

Post by zeroCalories »

ramraj07 wrote: post #202
heavyset_go wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do take home assignments, but when I did, I would offer to do it at my hourly rate, even if it was just an hour. It's time I would otherwise spend making money. Anyone worth working with respected that and I landed several clients who forwent the assignment altogether. It's chump change in the grand scheme of things, and often a formality. Does help that I have a very public web presence and portfolio, though…

I have foregone our take home for exceptional candidates, but let me ask you, do you also demand compensation for in person or zoom call 1-1 interviews? Surely thats the same time of your life.

It signals a degree of investment from the other side if they're willing to burn their own time talking to you. I can understand a small screening process to filter candidates, but I'm not going to do your silly dance for multiple hours if you're not going to do it with me.
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