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Where is this magic ICPC competition answers database that they're using?

"Database" was not meant in a literal sense. Clearly a lot of knowledge from similar problems is encoded in the model, that is why you can use models as a kind of fuzzy encyclopedia.

It is like an open book exam for humans where they also can lookup similar problems.

The current top comment makes the same point, but in a more diplomatic and sophisticated manner.

I mean strong human contestants would also know a lot of similar problems, I'm not seeing how it's fundamentally different or not a meaningful achievement.

Do you also think that IBM Watson won Jeopardy primarily because of its ability to reason?

Or due to its massive internal database combined with superhuman button pressing skills?

As far as I know Watson was actually smoke and mirrors, relying on a ton of human hand written rules and didn't do any reasoning at all. It was a giant program written in PROLOG, not machine learning.

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