"[...] Eventually, AI will be able to solve even the hardest contest problems that we’ve seen yet. It will work alongside us and help drive the discovery of new knowledge. What you take from this week - the sense of being stuck, the thrill of progress, and the practice of building together - will remain critical as you shape your community and the future you build. [...]"
By Chief Scientist of OpenAI, Jakub Pachocki. Who happens to be an incredibly accomplished Competitive Programmer (2nd in ICPC World Finals, Winner of Code Jam, 2nd in Hacker Cup).
[1] https://icpc.global/community/history/brochures/world-finals...
People still compete in playing musical instruments, riding horses, painting pictures, etc. All redundant because of technology but still they do it for other reasons, not the practical utility of the product of their work.
I believe it runs with the same test data as in the actual contest.
Doesn't seem to be publicly accessible to non-participants (yet?)
It does seem to be missing 3 problems though.
Nothing like CF garbage, solving imaginary patterns that no one cares about.
Topcoder/ICPC/CodeJam have the best problem statements.
Check out this for example: https://codeforces.com/contest/2136/problem/C
Why would I care if some array can be obtained by combining some other patterns?
It's rarely the case that looking at school names is useful (for many things in life) when there are more data points.
In this case, without any insider knowledge, just by looking at their profiles, the relevant name would appear to be Benjamin Jeter (https://codeforces.com/profile/BenjaminJ) rather than ASU. Currently 5th active American in the top competitive programming platform, top 200 worldwide (https://codeforces.com/ratings/country/United%20States). That's elite.
In teams of 3, even one "super player" can make a big difference. Almost certainly carrying that team.
I guess, like a lot of other sports at the college level, having a reputation that attracts the best competitive programmers (and a great coach to go along with it) doesn't hurt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Stankevich
Russia has specialized schools to support this kind of education, so are China and many other countries. Thus, they rank very high in IOI and ICPC contests
https://worldfinals.icpc.global/scoreboard/2025/problems/A.p...
For each cell of (team, problem), the "ratio" x/y isn't actually a ratio. x means how many submissions were made. y is the minute when the accepted solution was submitted. For example, "3/298" means they made 3 submissions in total, and the accepted solution was submitted in the 298th minute (the contest lasted 300 minutes).
The penalty ("Time" column) is calculated as (sum of y) + 20 * (sum of (x-1)).
toonewbie•5mo ago
Congratulations to all the teams!
tshaddox•5mo ago
Except for problem C, which was only submitted by 4 teams, all unsuccessfully.
cperciva•5mo ago
hatthew•5mo ago
orlp•5mo ago
amluto•5mo ago
What you can do is to submit a 25 page PDF that the organizers will print and stick on your desk for the competition. And you could put a careful implementation of a very basic simplex solver using dense matrices that is optimized for ease of transcription, taking up, say, half a page. You would hope not to use it because it’s absurd, but then if this problem C shows up, the fastest typist on the team can type it in verbatim.
If I, personally, did this and won the contest as a result, I would feel slightly bad. In my opinion, the contest organizers should either provide an LP solver or refrain from giving obvious LP problems like this.
Obviously OpenAI could kick everyone’s butt by typing faster than any human and by effectively having a large memorized library of pre-written code. Honestly, LLMs vs humans in the ICPC feels a bit like IBM’s old Jeopardy stunt where the machine had a huge advantage in its ability to push the button.
orlp•5mo ago
I'd just like to clarify that I'm not saying this is necessarily the solution the problem writers were looking for, or that it will run within the allocated time. Just that it's a feasible solution.
amluto•5mo ago
gregdeon•5mo ago
yallpendantools•5mo ago
The farthest I got in the ICPC was regionals. I was tasked to make the team binder. I was a budding LaTeX enthusiast then but our coach wanted me to do it in...MS Word. Not that he didn't know LaTeX either (he's a published math/CS researcher after all), it's just the cultural ubiquity and comfort of MS Word. :(
The result was something more like https://github.com/ludopulles/tcr/blob/master/TCR-Sudo.pdf . I love how information-dense tcr.pdf looks in comparison. They even have a table of contents!
dchftcs•5mo ago
amluto•5mo ago
orlp•5mo ago
> I'd just like to clarify that I'm not saying this is necessarily the solution the problem writers were looking for, or that it will run within the allocated time. Just that it's a feasible solution.
I don't doubt there's a clever dedicated flow algorithm the problem writers intended instead of the blunt tool which is LP.
jeremykvlim•5mo ago
You may view (one of) the judge's solution to this problem (and the rest of the problems) here: https://github.com/SnapDragon64/ACMFinalsSolutions/blob/mast...
tshaddox•5mo ago