In a victory for human intellect, developer Przemysław Dębiak has defeated an AI in a gruelling coding battle.
The event, the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic Contest held in Tokyo, pitted human programmers against AI in a formidable 10-hour challenge.
Dębiak, a renowned figure in competitive programming, emerged at the top of the leaderboard.
“Humanity has prevailed (for now!)” declared Dębiak, in a post on X.
While acknowledging the results of the coding battle are provisional, Dębiak expressed confidence that his lead over the AI was substantial enough to hold.
The AtCoder contest is an optimisation programming event where participants must devise the most efficient solution to a complex problem for which a perfect answer is practically impossible to find.
Such challenges often involve tasks like resource allocation or scheduling. In this instance, Dębiak’s custom-coded program achieved a score of approximately 45.2 billion points. This edged out OpenAI’s entry, ‘OpenAIAHC’, which scored around 43 billion, giving the human competitor a lead of about five percent in the AI coding battle.
“I’m completely exhausted. I figured, I had 10h of sleep in the last 3 days and I’m barely alive,” Dębiak shared.
Problems in AtCoder Heuristic Contests are notoriously complex. A past example involved packing between 50 and 200 non-overlapping rectangles into a large grid. Each rectangle had to contain a specific point and have its area be as close as possible to a target value, with the ultimate goal of maximising a total satisfaction score.
Success in such contests relies on creating clever heuristic algorithms, such as greedy placement or simulated annealing, to navigate the vast number of potential solutions.
This latest “humans vs AI” coding battle was a direct test of intellect and endurance. While an AI can work tirelessly, Dębiak’s win demonstrates that human ingenuity, creativity, and problem-solving under immense pressure can still triumph.
Dębiak’s ability to craft a superior heuristic algorithm within the 10-hour limit shows that, for now, human developers can hold the line against their AI counterparts.
See also: Can open-source survive the onslaught of AI slop?
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