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by PartiallyTyped 1292 days ago
That's just unfair for the competition. Are we at a point in time when we need to treat competitive programming like chess?

Given how similar ChatGPT and siblings are to how chess bots work these days, I am somehow not surprised.
1 comments
jstanley 1292 days ago
I think the only problem is that they're proprietary. If they were free software that everyone could use then we could compensate by making the problems harder.

It's not really any different to using high-level programming languages with extensive standard libraries versus doing everything in assembly language.

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monsieurbanana 1292 days ago
I think it's pretty different from using high-level languages. I'm not interested in a competition that would be decided before even starting by who has the best AI program.
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jstanley 1292 days ago
That's why it needs to be free software.

I'm not interested in a competition that is decided by who has the best Python interpreter, but since we all have the same Python interpreter that isn't a problem.

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swid 1292 days ago
Even if it is free, I have no interest in playing chess against a superhuman chess bot. You don’t even have to know how to play chess to use the moves the bots recommend and win against a grandmaster.

The line is blurry today, but we are moving into territory where humans will not be able to solve programming challenges that require under 200 lines of code faster than AI - we are slower to read and type. The AIs will likely get better at understanding the problems, requiring less help from humans and fewer attempts to find a solution.

At some point using a language model to compete in these kinds of programming contests will absolutely be like using a poker or chess bot to compete in those games.

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PartiallyTyped 1292 days ago
But that is missing the point.

It stops being about the most ingenious solution. It becomes a pay2win game. There is no creativity, there is no actual competition.

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jstanley 1291 days ago
The problems can just become more difficult to the point that creative prompt engineering is required.

This is actually a really really good thing, because it means the level of abstraction at which programmers work has just taken a big step up.

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