Borys Minaiev

Highly recommend participating in the Midnight Code Cup contest. It's going to be a very unique experience, since the finals are 24h long and (AFAIK) it's the only onsite contest where using AI agents is not only allowed but highly encouraged. If you've ever fantasized about participating in a contest, that's honestly your best bet. Those contests are designed to be weird and people who have done competitive programming for 10 years won't have any real advantage over you. Some details: - it's a team contest (3 people) - qualifications are online (April 11, 4h online on codeforces) - finals are in Belgrade, Serbia (July 4-5, 24h) - organizers' write-up from previous edition: codeforces.com/blog/entry/143… - more details: midnightcodecup.org Last but not least, it's unclear how many such contests we're going to have, so don't miss your chance!

My first blogpost is out: ikot.blog/anthropic-take… Like many of you, my feed has been dominated recently by Anthropic's Optimization team take-home. TL;DR: They retired this "notoriously difficult" exam because Claude Opus 4.5 effectively solved it. So, they released the task, and everyone started the grind. Yes, AI beat human candidates here, but AI-generated solutions aren't easy to follow if you aren't familiar with the domain. And they carry 0 educational value. I didn't just want to see the solution; I wanted to understand the mechanics under the hood. So I spent the weekend digging into the task. I started with a naive Python baseline that took 147k cycles. After three rounds of specific optimizations, I got it down to ~2,200 cycles. That’s a 65x speedup—and likely would have passed the hiring bar half a year ago. I’ve just published a full breakdown of the solution. I explain everything in detail and depth, but I kept it accessible. Hope you'll love the visuals! Enjoy!

Midnight Code Cup 2026 Qual - April, 11 Finals - July, 4-5 Save the dates!

Sharing OpenAI's submissions that solved 12 out of 12 problems from the ICPC World Finals, under the same 5-hour constraint and judged concurrently and identically to championship submissions. github.com/openai/openai-…

1/n I’m really excited to share that our @OpenAI reasoning system got a perfect score of 12/12 during the 2025 ICPC World Finals, the premier collegiate programming competition where top university teams from around the world solve complex algorithmic problems. This would have placed it first among all human participants. 🥇🥇

5/5 Huge congratulations to the SPbSU team for winning the main competition. They solved their 11th problem with only two minutes left—an impressive performance!

4/5 Progress is very fast! A year ago, AI struggled with even easy contest problems. Now it performs better than the best human teams. If this trend continues, next year we may see real scientific discoveries made by AI.

1/5 In 2015, I won the ICPC World Finals as a member of the ITMO University team. It was the only time in Finals history when a team solved all the problems before the contest ended.

2/n We officially competed in the online AI track of the IOI, where we scored higher than all but 5 (of 330) human participants and placed first among AI participants. We had the same 5 hour time limit and 50 submission limit as human participants. Like the human contestants, our system competed *without* internet or RAG, and just access to a basic terminal tool.

Very nice analysis of the system we have built for solving heuristic contests!

1/N I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s most prestigious math competition—the International Math Olympiad (IMO).

@FakePsyho Congrats!

Humanity has prevailed (for now!) I'm completely exhausted. I figured, I had 10h of sleep in the last 3 days and I'm barely alive. I'll post more about the contest when I get some rest. (To be clear, those are provisional results, but my lead should be big enough)

we're competing in the @atcoder World Finals programming contest. real nailbiter — OpenAI has been #1 for most of the contest. looked like it might be over when @FakePsyho pulled ahead, but we've just retaken the lead. 1 hour and 20 minutes to go!

@FakePsyho I am in London, unfortunately :( But some people from OpenAI will be onsite tomorrow.

@bminaiev At least you're honest about the match being not fair 😅 Btw are you (or anyone else) coming tomorrow? My (nearly) blind guess is that someone from OpenAI will at least join remotely for the live stream.

Tomorrow is AWTF Heuristics (the biggest onsite for heuristic contests since Topcoder Open). If you're wondering how am I doing 12h before the start of the contest, this is the current state of my TODO list.

@FakePsyho I know what we are planning to do, but I wasn't sure if the rules for the humans are the same :)

Yes, which is an issue. With TCO everyone got an exactly the same machine. Here you can grab whatever external compute you want. Normally automatic hyperparameter optimization is questionable, but here it makes sense to grab a 1 (or more?) 192 core machines. That's why I've never built those tools before and now suddenly they would be very useful. That being said, if the problem is unusual enough, bigger compute may give no real edge, so hard to say. Also, wait, shouldn't you know this? Aren't you on the side of AI in the humans vs AI competition? 😅

300+ teams. 68 countries. 24 hours. Only 30 made it to the finals. Only 1 will win. On June 7-8, 30 finalist teams will gather in Belgrade for Midnight Code Cup — a 24-hour engineering battle judged by ICPC world champions Powered by Recraft and partners, built by world champions. Here’s what makes MCC different 🧵👇

@wata_orz We can probably send your prize in USDt instead of TON if it works better for you.

Code weekendの賞金のTONって仮想通貨、日本の取引所だとBitPointだけ扱ってるぽいが入金機能が無いぽいな… これもしや日本だと換金不能か