[HarHarVeryFunny]

ICPC = The International Collegiate Programming Contest. These are college level programmers, not elite competitive programmers.

Apparently Gemini solved one problem (running on who knows what kind of cluster) by burning 30 min of "thinking" time on it, and at a cost that Google have declined to provide.

According to one prior competition paricipant, writing in the comments section of this ArsClasica coverage, each year they include one "time sink" problem that smart humans will avoid until they have tackled everything else.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/google-gemini-earns-g...

This would all seem to put a rather different spin on this. It's not a case of Google outwitting the worlds best programmers, but rather that by searching for solutions for 30 min on god knows what kind of cloud hardware, they were able to get something done that the college kids did not have time to complete, or deem worthwhile starting.

[amluto]

These are college-student or occasionally grad-school programmers who qualified to enter the ICPC World Finals, generally by performing sufficiently well at a regional championship to qualify. You can read actual rules here (see "Advancing to the ICPC World Finals"):

https://icpc.global/regionals/rules

I don't know what you mean by "elite", and there are certainly plenty of teams at the World Finals that are not especially competitive, and there certainly many elite programers who don't qualify for various reasons (most obviously by being the wrong age or not in the right stage of school or having already attended too many times), but I find it hard to believe that there aren't enough "elite" programmers present to make the winning teams be genuinely elite.

Compare to, say, the Olympics or pretty much any academic olympiad. There are many people and teams at the Olympics who are not remotely competitive with the winners.

[Ylpertnodi]

> There are many people and teams at the Olympics who are not remotely competitive with the winners.

And yet, they are so much closer to the winners than the people that came 11th, 12th etc.

[512]

The ICPC has plenty of elite competitive programmers. It's an activity that "peaks" in importance around college, and not many keep training a lot after participating.

Every year there are multiple "Legendary Grandmasters" in the competition. That's >3000 Elo in Codeforces. I'd estimate it takes a similar level of skill/effort as becoming a Chess Grandmaster.

And even those that aren't at that level are very competent at it. The average ICPC participant is likely "smarter" than the average MIT/Harvard CS student for some reasonable measure of "smarter".

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I didn't realize - didn't mean to disparage anyone.

[mannycalavera42]

I've competed in these contest before. There are probably more difficult than what we can call _elite_ competitive programmer

note: my team only passed the first 2 rounds, far from bragging about my skills here :)

[gerash]

ICPC world finals questions are not easy. Idk what your talking about

[dist-epoch]

Let's bookmark this comment and check again next year, if the freely available models will be able to do it for a few dollars.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Sure, although my point wasn't intended to be about the cost (which would still be interesting to know), but rather that the win by Google seems more down to brute force than intelligence.

[JohnKemeny]

> ICPC = The International Collegiate Programming Contest. These are college level programmers, not elite competitive programmers.

ICPC finalists are very much in the world elite of competitive programmers.