Humanity has not prevailed ( • ᴖ • ｡) AWTF Heuristic is now over and OpenAI has completely demolished human competitors. In the end, humans performed quite well, but the performance of OpenAI was outstanding. I'll post my detailed thoughts about this in a few days, since this deserves a longer commentary.

My nuanced predictions for the AWTF heuristic human vs AI: You may think that since OpenAI took 2nd place in 2025 and the progress over the last year has been insane this should be an easy win for the AI. It's not. At least not an easy one. There are a lot of things that I need to cover so let me briefly go over everything that's important. Where AI agents are today: - Produce code at insane speeds; a single agent is probably one-two orders of magnitude faster than the fastest humans - Excellent at finding relevant and applicable knowledge - Good at reasoning about problems that are easily explainable via text - Code quality and expressiveness is much better but still behind very good coders, this mostly matters in larger projects so it's unclear if this will have any impact here - Standard autoresearch tends to easily get stuck in local minima - Surprisingly bad at code optimization. If you believe otherwise... I'm sorry. Performing well in complex optimization problems requires the following: - Very good and thorough problem understanding. For common problems it's enough to apply and tweak existing knowledge, but with truly unique problems you really need some form of continual learning. - Being able to quickly implement all ideas. Solving those complex problems is an iterative process: each time you test a new idea, you gain new knowledge that improves your understanding of the problem. The quicker you go, the more information you'll be able to extract. - Squeezing the maximum performance out of your idea. This often requires performing many tests with minor tweaks. It's also worth noting that IMHO humans heavily underperformed (including me, due to lack of sleep) in 2025. If I competed in isolation (without a leaderboard), my guess would be that I'd probably finish around 4-6th place. Based on everything above we can say that the main advantage of AI is insane speed and the ability to parallelize work, but its main weakness is that as time goes on it won't be much smarter about the problem it's trying to solve. If you need a simple analogy: AI here is like 100 okay-ish programmers heavily cooperating with each other. The longer the contest goes and the more unique the problem is, the higher the chances for humans are. On the other hand, if the problem is very heavy on the implementation side and/or we can arrive at great solution by performing small tweaks (i.e. the gradient from "random solution" to a very good one is smooth), humans won't have much of a chance. In 2025, problem setters assumed that AI is not that good yet and the problem wasn't "AI-proofed". I'm pretty sure that this year there was a lot of thought put into problem design and we can expect something truly unique. I'm sure that there exists many different problems where humans have a good chance of winning vs AI, but finding them might be very tricky and obviously AtCoder cannot test against the best in-house model that OpenAI currently has. On the other hand, one might ask yourself why in 2026 OpenAI decided to compete again vs humans. In 2025 they had a very strong result in IMO, got the 2nd place at AWTF heuristic and solved all of the problems at the ICPC. That would be a huge narrative violation if in 2026 they didn't easily win, right? Considering this, I expect that OpenAI put some actual effort into it and this is not just the same thing they did in 2025 with a stronger underlying model. A lot of current AI downsides can be alleviated by better harness (in order to improve exploration of different ideas) and massive parallelization. Since it's OpenAI official participation, we can safely assume that OpenAI has infinite inference at its disposal here. With massive inference issues like "bad at code optimization" should mostly disappear. Ok, that's a lot of text, so what's my actual prediction? I do believe that OpenAI put significant effort and expects to win. If they were consistently winning online 10-day contests then winning 2-day finals should be easy. I'm also sure that AtCoder's final problem is going to be very unique and completely unrelated to any of the past problems. Unless OpenAI slowplays their advantage, we should expect that once again they will have a crushing lead right from the start. Once again humans will be playing a catch-up game. We might expect some tweets from OpenAI if their advantage is huge near the end of the competition, but I wouldn't be surprised if they wait till they get their full sweep with both heuristic & algo. In the end, I think I give humans around 20-25% chance of winning. Either way, this should be both entertaining and educational since we rarely get a chance to see any of the frontier AI labs trying to put their best in-house models to the test.

The most important* human vs AI programming competition of 2026 starts in 8 hours: - another edition of AWTF heuristic, where AI placed 2nd in 2025 - the 12 best human heuristic competitors vs whatever OpenAI has been cooking and probably won't see the light of day for at least a few months - a single complex optimization problem made specifically for the competition - the contest lasts two days: on day one only the leaderboard is available to avoid spoilers for competitors; day two will feature a full 10-hour live commentary with analysis, interviews and a lot of awkward silence *surprisingly not hyperbole links in the comments ⬇️ Note: I'll be tweeting a lot about the tournament over the next few days. If you don't want to see it, feel free to mute "AWTF"