Comment by paladin314159 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paladin314159 | Hacker News Reader

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> 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 not true for the VAST majority of programmers and software engineers.

Much like trying to do IMO problems without tons of training/practice, the mid-to-hard problems in the ICPC are completely unapproachable to the average computer science student (who already has a better chance than the average software engineer) in the course of a week.

In the same way that LLMs have memorized tons of stuff, the top competitors capable of achieving a gold medal at the ICPC know algorithms, data structures, and how to pattern match them to problems to an extreme degree.

> 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.)

> That's a whole field of wonderful computer science / math that is mostly usable via a couple of extraordinarily expensive closed-source offerings.

Take a look at Google OR-Tools: https://developers.google.com/optimization/

OR-Tools is a whole grab-bag of tools, most of which are wrappers around various solvers, including Gurobi and CPLEX. It seems like CP-SAT is under the OR-Tools umbrella, and CP-SAT may well be state-of-the-art for the specific sets of problems that it's well-suited for.

Yeah, absolutely, I spent months preparing for the ICPC with my team and ended up scoring a paltry 3/12. A week would likely not have helped us at all - we simply had no idea how to approach the rest! Top teams are on another level.

Compute and such is a fair point but that AI is here at all is mind-blowing to me.

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