DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC • Hacker News Board

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#71

Post by artninja1988 » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #34

tgma wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Companies valued at $300 billion or more are not another individual and people are not "sharing" their works. The companies are stealing them. For the majority of interesting output people have paid for art, music, software, journalism. But you know that already and are justifying the industry that pays your bills.

Copying something isn't stealing, though.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#72

Post by zeroonetwothree » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #67

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…

It doesn't matter how many instances were running. All that matters is the wall clock time and the cost. The fact that they don't disclose the cost is a clue that it's probably outrageous today. But costs are coming down fast. And hiring a team of these guys isn't exactly cheap either.

Human teams are limited to three people. So why doesn’t it matter how many instances they used?

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#73

Post by conradkay » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:10 PM UTC

birktj wrote: post #5

They apparently managed gold in the IOI as well. A result that was extremely surprising for me and causes me to rethink a lot of assumptions I have about current LLMs. Unfortunately there was very little transparency on how they managed those results and the only source was a Twitter post. I want to know if there was any third party oversight, what kind of compute they used, how much power what kind of models and how…

I don't see that much reason to be skeptical since this basically lines up with the trend we've been seeing in their performance.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#74

Post by modeless » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #72

modeless wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how many instances were running. All that matters is the wall clock time and the cost. The fact that they don't disclose the cost is a clue that it's probably outrageous today. But costs are coming down fast. And hiring a team of these guys isn't exactly cheap either.

Human teams are limited to three people. So why doesn’t it matter how many instances they used?

Human brains and cloud instances are not remotely equivalent. What you can compare on an equivalent basis is cost.

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#75

Post by chpatrick » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

Don't worry, they're just stochastic parrots copying answers from Stack Overflow. ;)

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#76

Post by tgma » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

stevesimmons wrote: post #70

ototot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a former ICPC winner, I'd say ICPC is mainly a test of teamwork, given the format of the competition (3 team mates, one computer, scoring that rewards clean solutions submitted quicker, tackled in the optimal order for your three sets of skills, etc). Sure, you need to be individually good at thinking, etc. But the difference between 1st and places further down the ranking is teamwork.

As a former ICPC participant, albeit not first place (hats off to you), I would generally characterize it as "having a good team," much more so than what's usually considered "teamwork." It is a parallelization/scheduling effort than deep interpersonal collaboration.

(In a certain sense, this is actually the ideal "teamwork" setup in the industry as well, to have a bunch of people who own their part and are trusted by their colleagues take care of it and not step on each other toes than kumbaya let's all get together on the same problem.)

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#77

Post by chpatrick » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

bgwalter wrote: post #35

A database is good at leetcode, who would have thought. Give humans a database and they'll outperform your "AI" (which probably uses an extraordinary amount of graphics cards and electricity). It is an idiotic benchmark, in line with the rest of the "AI" propaganda.

Where is this magic ICPC competition answers database that they're using?

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#78

Post by d--b » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

Two words: Uh oh

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#79

Post by delichon » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

artninja1988 wrote: post #71

bgwalter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies valued at $300 billion or more are not another individual and people are not "sharing" their works. The companies are stealing them. For the majority of interesting output people have paid for art, music, software, journalism. But you know that already and are justifying the industry that pays your bills.

Copying something isn't stealing, though.

  Interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer trespasses into the copyright owner’s domain, but he does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Although it is no less unlawful or wrongful for that reason, it is not a theft.

Justice Blackmun, Dowling v. United States, 1985

Re: DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC

#80

Post by amluto » Wed, Sep 17, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

paladin314159 wrote: post #64

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…

> 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. I don't know what your personal experience with competitive programming is, so your statement may be true for yourself, but I can confidently state that this is n…

> I can confidently state that this is not true for the VAST majority of programmers and software engineers.

That may well be true. I think it's even more true in cases where the user is not a programmer by profession. I once watched someone present their graduate-level research in a different field and explain how they had solved a real-world problem in their field by writing a complicated computer program full of complicated heuristics to get it to run fast enough and thinking "hmm, I'm pretty sure that a standard algorithm from computer graphics could be adapted to directly solve your problem in O(n log n) time".

If users can get usable algorithms that approximately match the state of the art out of a chatbot (or a fancy "agent") without needing to know the magic words, then that would be amazing, regardless of whether those chatbots/agents ever become creative enough to actually advance the state of the art.

(I sometimes dream of an AI producing a piece of actual code that comes even close to state of the art for solving mixed-integer optimization problems. That's a whole field of wonderful computer science / math that is mostly usable via a couple of extraordinarily expensive closed-source offerings.)