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DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

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Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#51

Post by ototot »

tgma wrote: post #49
ototot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I'm a ICPC medalist (not this year though) but not a IOI medalist. Another evidence is that you only have 5 hours to solve 3 problems in IOI, but you need to solve 10+ problems in ICPC. It's impossible to have all 10+ problems to at IOI level in ICPC.

> Because I'm a ICPC medalist (not this year though) but not a IOI medalist. Isn't getting a medal a function of your ranking, not score, in both cases? If so, that does not prove much about the difficulty of either.

OK. I think my opinion and definition on "easier" is indeed vague. For "easier", I'm only comparing the thinking difficulty.

Yes, medal is function of ranking but not difficulty.

Nonetheless, I would say that IOI more focus on thinking, which I to some degree is not that good at, while ICPC is more like a mix thinking and implementing. Therefore, my ability to implement stuff can improve my ICPC ranking but not IOI.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#52

Post by baq »

birktj wrote: post #31
XenophileJKO wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So outside of human intervention, I don't think the specifics really matter. What this means is that it is possible and that this capability will in time be commoditized. This is helpful in framing the conversation, especially with "skeptics" of what these models are capable of.

To a certain extent I agree. But as far as I know I cannot go to chatgpt.com and paste the newest ICPC problems and get full solutions. And there is no information about what they do differently. For a competition like the ICPC, which is academic in its nature, I think it is very unfortunate to setup a seperate AI track like this without publishing clear public information about what that actually entails. And have c…

If you assume the brain is a computer (why wouldn't it be is my stance), we have a long ways to go in the optimization department, both in hardware and in software. If it's possible to do at all using hundreds of kilowatt-hours of electricity, no reason it shouldn't be possible within a few hundred Wh (which is a scary prospect, I agree, with consequences hard to imagine when realized.)

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#53

Post by smokel »

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, and the others do not.

I wonder how three different AI vendors would cooperate. It would probably lift reinforcement learning to the next level.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#54

Post by kadushka »

jug wrote: post #15
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #2

So this year SotA models have gotten gold at IMO, IoI, ICPC and beat 9/10 humans in that atcoder thing that tested optimisation problems. Yet the most reposted headlines and rethoric is "wall this", "stangation that", "model regression", "winter", "bubble", doom etc.

Even Sam Altman himself thinks we’re in a bubble, and he ought to have a good sense of the wind direction here. I think the contradiction here can be reconciled by how these tests don’t tend to run on the typical hardware constraints they need to be able do this at scale. And herein lies a large part of the problem as far as I can tell; in late 2024, OpenAI realized they had to rethink GPT-5 since their first attempt…

it was not a revolutionary update but evolutionary at best compared to o3

It is a revolutionary update if compared to the previous major release (GPT-4 from March 2023).

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#55

Post by observationist »

tgma wrote: post #27
ferguess_k wrote: post #25

I think in the future information will be more walled -- because AI companies are not paying anyone for that piece of information, and I encourage everyone to put their knowledge on their own website, and for each page, put up a few urls that humans won't be able to find (but can still click if he knows where to find), but can be crawled by AI, which link to pages containing falsified information (such as, oh the inf…

Why the AI hate? How is it different from sharing your knowledge with another individual or writing a book to share it? > AI companies are not paying anyone for that piece of information So? For the vast majority of human existence, paying for content was not a thing, just like paying for air isn't. The copyright model you are used to may just be too forced. Many countries have no moral qualms about "pirating" Window…

These vigorously held and loudly proclaimed opinions don't matter.

Don't waste the mental energy. They're more interested in performative ignorance and argument than anything productive. It's somewhere between trying to engage Luddites during the industrial revolution and having a reasonable discussion with /pol/ .

They'd rather cling to what they know than embrace change, or get in rhetorical zingers, and nothing will change that except a collision with reality.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#56

Post by Davidzheng »

ferguess_k wrote: post #25

I think in the future information will be more walled -- because AI companies are not paying anyone for that piece of information, and I encourage everyone to put their knowledge on their own website, and for each page, put up a few urls that humans won't be able to find (but can still click if he knows where to find), but can be crawled by AI, which link to pages containing falsified information (such as, oh the inf…

I for one welcome advancement of science and mathematics from our AI overlords

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#57

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ICPC = The International Collegiate Programming Contest. These are college level programmers, not elite competitive programmers.

Apparently Gemini solved one problem (running on who knows what kind of cluster) by burning 30 min of "thinking" time on it, and at a cost that Google have declined to provide.

According to one prior competition paricipant, writing in the comments section of this ArsClasica coverage, each year they include one "time sink" problem that smart humans will avoid until they have tackled everything else.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-gemini-earns-g...

This would all seem to put a rather different spin on this. It's not a case of Google outwitting the worlds best programmers, but rather that by searching for solutions for 30 min on god knows what kind of cloud hardware, they were able to get something done that the college kids did not have time to complete, or deem worthwhile starting.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#58

Post by atleastoptimal »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #2

So this year SotA models have gotten gold at IMO, IoI, ICPC and beat 9/10 humans in that atcoder thing that tested optimisation problems. Yet the most reposted headlines and rethoric is "wall this", "stangation that", "model regression", "winter", "bubble", doom etc.

People pattern match with a very low-resolution view of the world (web3/crypt/nfts were a bubble because there was hype, so there must be a bubble since AI is hyped! I am very smart) and fail to reckon with the very real ways in which AI is fundamentally different.

Also I think people do understand just how big of a deal AI is but don't want to accept it or at least publicly admit it because they are scared for a number of reasons, least of all being human irrelevance.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#59

Post by amluto »

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 competing have absolutely massive memorization capacity, whereas the teams are allowed to bring a 25-page PDF with them and they need to manually transcribe anything from that PDF that they actually want to use in a submission.

I think that, if you gave me the ability to search the pre-contest Internet and a week to prepare my submissions, I would be kind of embarrassed if I didn't get gold, and I'd find the contest to be rather less interesting than I would find the real thing.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#60

Post by Davidzheng »

jaggs wrote: post #13

I think it's becoming clear that these mega AI corps are juggling with their models at inference time to produce unrealistically good results. By that it seems that they're just cranking up the compute beyond reasonable levels in order to gain PR points against each other. The fact is most ordinary mortals never get access to a fraction of that kind of power, which explains the commonly reported issues with AI models…

Ok but if they can pump those compute and get science/math advancements it's worth something even if the costs are very high
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