The "Diamond Sponsors" of the event are Huawei and OpenAI. I found the welcome note from OpenAI [1] quite curious:
"[...] 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).
That curious statement comes across as inappropriate. These talented students are among the best in the world. Yet, openai chose to make it about and praise themselves. That was not classy.
foxglacier · 21h ago
Surely it's meant to reassure the contestants that they're not wasting their time. They'll obviously know AI can do some of this stuff so it's a reminder that the true purpose of the competition isn't to be good at programming.
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.
lordhumphrey · 13h ago
Peak HN here. Playing musical instruments is "redundant because of technology". And so is "riding horses"? And "painting pictures". Eh, what?
lioeters · 12h ago
I think they mean audio recording/reproduction, automobiles, and cameras have replaced much of what musicians, horses, and painters used to do. Similarly, AI will replace much of the thinking and problem solving done by programmers.
eunos · 23h ago
Lol and the Huawei note wrote otherwise. AI still hallucinates a lot so pursue mastery over algorithms and data structures to improve the technology
Mr-Frog · 21h ago
Chinese century incoming.
brcmthrowaway · 21h ago
How many chief scientists (aka career climbers) does OpenAI have at this point?
rfoo · 18h ago
meret is really good tho.
toonewbie · 1d ago
I was onsite today watching the contest live, and great atmosphere all around. One surprising outcome: the team in 17th place solved the same number of problems as the team that won gold in 4th place. Hopefully that isn't too demotivating to any team and we can see better separation in the future. After all, it can only mean that the problemsetters underestimated the contestants ;)
Congratulations to all the teams!
tshaddox · 1d ago
> the problemsetters underestimated the contestants
Except for problem C, which was only submitted by 4 teams, all unsuccessfully.
cperciva · 1d ago
I don't blame them. That problem statement seems to be deliberately confusing.
tshaddox · 23h ago
Yes, I meant to imply that the problemsetters are to blame.
hatthew · 1d ago
I doesn't seem that unclear to me? I absolutely don't have the skill to solve it, but it took <2 minutes to understand the problem and goal.
orlp · 22h ago
It doesn't seem that hard to solve to me either. It's solvable with basic linear programming.
1. Add a variable for each node, and a variable for each output edge from stations.
2. For each reservoir add equality constraints to the sum of incoming edges with the coefficients given in the problem.
3. For each station add equality constraints between the weighted sum of its inputs (which is 1 for the root station) and its outputs (which are the variables we added).
4. Add an out_edge >= 0 constraint for each output edge on stations to forbid illegal negative flows.
5. Add a variable m which is constrained to be less than all the output station variables.
6. Maximize m.
amluto · 21h ago
This happens every now and then. Basic LP isn’t conceptually so bad, but the ICPC environment doesn’t come with CPLEX or Gurobi, let alone a less fancy open source tool. And there is definitely not a copy of cvxopt around to make this easy. Even if you want to quickly kludge up an interior point solver, you don’t have a linear algebra package available (sorry, no numpy or BLAS).
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.
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.
yallpendantools · 15h ago
Amazing! Thanks for sharing.
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. :(
Wow, incredibly interesting to see what one of these manuals looks like! Thanks for sharing.
amluto · 20h ago
Mine did too :). But I never used it except for practice.
dchftcs · 17h ago
I suspect the lack of success of the teams resulted from overfitting for the more standard pattern that is solving a max flow, and I also suspect the organizers are deliberately using this to trick the contestants. Spending time to practice coding vanilla algorithms to solve either max flow or a linear program is a waste of time for >99% of computer scientists.
In the TV show Silicon Valley, there’s a joke that Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, the perennial underperformer, did his undergrad at ASU. But I guess that’s one thing the show got wrong, because Arizona State University finished among the top three American schools in the world finals.
lordhumphrey · 13h ago
Wow, China with a pretty dominant position there with 3 teams in the top five. Interesting seeing Karlsruhe there too, I'd been looking at that school.
jmpman · 17h ago
Wow ASU, the 4th highest US School. Not bad when also being a top party school.
In teams of 3, even one "super player" can make a big difference. Almost certainly carrying that team.
sanatik · 17h ago
My alma-mater is only 61st. I remember the times we’re top 30.
Great atmosphere though! I wonder if these competitions will become obsolete as LLMs advance.
MisterSandman · 11h ago
I don’t see why it would. Chess is still bigger than ever.
cptroot · 1d ago
Does anyone know how long it will be until the input/output data packet is made available? I'm interested in taking a crack at some of these but know I always miss an edge case.
I believe it runs with the same test data as in the actual contest.
dooglius · 17h ago
> You need to join the contest in order to be allowed to submit.
Doesn't seem to be publicly accessible to non-participants (yet?)
muldvarp · 12h ago
I expect OpenAI to have crushed the competition here.
agnishom · 17h ago
What is Moscow's secret to training their programmers so well?
pedrosorio · 17h ago
*St. Petersburg
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
userbinator · 17h ago
The "Russian hacker" stereotype is not at all fiction. If you've ever worked with developers from any of the former USSR, you'll know what I mean; they are not afraid to be creative and do whatever it takes to solve the problem.
dikei · 12h ago
Start training them from a very young age: competitive coders typical start in secondary/high school or even earlier.
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
wiz21c · 14h ago
what's the meaning of of the A,B,C... columns It's a ratio but of what over what ?
acomjean · 12h ago
The columns are the questions. The score is “total att/solved”, (attempted/ solved?) though that doesn’t help much. I’m guessing you need to get the answer within the time limit.
"[...] 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.
Congratulations to all the teams!
Except for problem C, which was only submitted by 4 teams, all unsuccessfully.
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.
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.
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!
https://icfpcontest2025.github.io/index.html
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 believe it runs with the same test data as in the actual contest.
Doesn't seem to be publicly accessible to non-participants (yet?)
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...
Nothing like CF garbage, solving imaginary patterns that no one cares about.