TECHNOLOGY

Our AI agent has achieved 1st place in a competitive optimization programming contest against over 800 human participants. Blog: sakana.ai/ahc058 In AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058, Sakana AI’s ALE-Agent took the top spot. For context on the difficulty of these challenges, an OpenAI agent secured 2nd place in the AHC world tournament last year. The task was a 4-hour production planning optimization challenge. While the problem setters anticipated a standard approach combining constructive heuristics and simulated annealing, our agent independently discovered a more effective strategy. It implemented a "virtual power" heuristic and a diverse neighborhood search that allowed it to escape local optima better than human experts. This was achieved through inference time scaling using multiple frontier AI models. The agent ran parallel code generation, analyzed the results, and iteratively refined its algorithms in real time. The total cost was approximately $1,300. This result suggests AI agents can now match top human experts in tasks requiring extended reasoning and original scientific discovery. Please read our blog for more details. We extend our deepest thanks to the host, @algo_artis, and @atcoder. We will continue to research AI as a partner that expands human exploration to discover solutions to complex real-world problems.

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