Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship - Ars Technica
“Humanity has prevailed (for now!),” writes winner after 10-hour coding marathon against OpenAI.
arstechnica.com
A Polish coder known as Psyho (Przemysław Dębiak) pulled off what might be one of the last great human victories over AI, narrowly beating OpenAI’s custom model in the 2025 AtCoder World Finals Heuristic contest. After a brutal 10-hour coding marathon on identical hardware, Psyho scored about 1.812 trillion points to the AI’s 1.655 trillion, pocketing 500,000 yen and declaring “Humanity has prevailed (for now!).”
The event—modeled on the John Henry folk tale—challenged the top 12 human programmers and an AI in a single NP-hard optimization problem with strict submission rules. While Psyho walked away exhausted but triumphant, OpenAI celebrated its first top-3 finish in a premier coding championship, marking a milestone in machine reasoning and long-term strategic planning.
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