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 ;)
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).
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.
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.
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.
A, B, C... are the ID of the problems (not sorted by difficulty, teams have to figure out the order).
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)).
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.
They have won the championship multiple times actually. There are times where "Western teams" are just full of mainland Chinese communicating in Mandarin (e.g. a few MIT teams in the past including the 2021 champions...)
21 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadCongratulations to all the teams!
"[...] 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...
It does seem to be missing 3 problems though.
Nothing like CF garbage, solving imaginary patterns that no one cares about.
https://icfpcontest2025.github.io/index.html
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)).