🟢 How did a "wrapper" beat 800 human experts?
Last year, an agent from OpenAI only took second place in the same competition.
This year, about 800 people participated in the AtCoder Heuristic Contest. The ALE-Agent from the Japanese laboratory outperformed everyone and took the top spot with a significant lead. The cost of solution was approximately £1,300.
Interestingly, authors of this year's optimization task themselves expected a classic approach using annealing and constructive heuristics, but the Sakana agent took a different path. He suddenly implemented the virtual power heuristic, which allowed him to escape local optima even better than human experts.
Agent is a rather clever wrapper over (in this case) GPT-5.2 high and Gemini 3 Pro high.
Sakana themselves never really shone in terms of models, but they learned to work competently with inference time scaling and here's the result.
In a word, well done! Read Here
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