The 2025 AtCoder World Finals Heuristic Contest was billed a Human vs AI showdown. It is difficult to know which was the more important - that it was Psyho, a Polish human programmer, who topped the leaderboard and was awarded the prize of 500,000 Japanese Yen, around $3,400 USD, or that OpenAIAHC came second, well ahead of all the other human contestants. 

At the end of what he considered a gruelling contest which he won in a convincing manner Przemysław Dębiak, aka Psycho, received the award from Naohiro Takahashi, AtCoder founder and CEO who, with the handle "chokudia" is himself  a high-ranked competitive programmer.

The event, which was organized by AtCoder, the Japanese competitive programming platform, was sponsored by OpenAI so that it could test the prowess of OpenAIAHC. As its name suggests, this model was built specifically for entering this heuristic contest. It is based on o3, the more powerful successor to o1, designed for enhanced reasoning capabilities using OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer architecture. 

Unlike many of the qualifying rounds (which are typically online AtCoder contests), the finals brought the top competitors, twelve humans and one AI, together in one physical location in Tokyo.

The task faced by the competitors was not to find a solution but to find the most efficient optimization to approach an NP-hard problem. Its Problem Statement reads:

There is an  N ×N grid. The coordinate of the top-left cell is (0, 0) and the coordinate of the cell i rows down and  j columns to the right is (i, j). There are walls between some adjacent cells.
There are  robots on the grid. The initial position of the k-th robot is (ik ,jk ), and its destination is (i'k ,j'k).

Takahashi wants to operate these robots to bring all of them to their respective destinations.
....

Guide all robots to their destinations using as few operations as possible.

The entire 10-hour contest was live streamed on You Tube:  

Excitement mounts among the judges as the contest nears its end with submissions being made and places are swapped around on the leaderboard.

Close scrutiny of the leaderboard reveals that nine of the competitors represent Japan with the visiting foreigners being Psyho from Poland, nikaj from Georgia and Rafbill from France while the AI flies the flag of the USA.

The Crowns with numbers on them next to the flags signify a programmer's Grand Prix 30 score, the points they had accumulated during the years for qualifying for the AtCoder World Tour Finals. Psyho, along with two of the Japanese competitors, had earned 30 points by placing high in the top 30 while nikag with 1 on the same light blue crown was at the low extreme of the top 30. The Yellow crowns represent a more accomplished level, but the 10 on them indicates being in the middle in terms of GP30 scores.

The competition website has more information about the finalists and this is taken from Psyho's profile:

At the end of the day what does this contest tell us about the relative performance of AI and humans when it comes to heuristic optimization?

As the scoreboard reveals, Psyho led the field by a wide margin, but the gap between OpenAIAHC and the 3rd placed competitor terry_u16 was even wider. Perhaps more importantly Psyho outperformed OpenAIAHC in terms of finding the Best solutions and Unique solutions and in these respects their scores were a different order of magnitude. One additional piece of information about Psyho may be relevant in explaining this  - in the past he worked for OpenAI. Is this just a red herring or will some humans always be superior to OpenAI?

More Information

AtCoder World Tour Finals 20205 - Heuristic

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