Sakana AI's coding agent beats 804 humans to win AtCoder contest
Sakana AI's ALE-Agent just took first place in the AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058, beating 804 human competitors in real time. Operating over four hours at a compute cost of roughly $1,300 across frontier models, the agent autonomously devised an optimization algorithm that outperformed the problem setter's intended solution. It marks the first time an AI agent has won a major competitive optimization programming contest.