ALE-Agent

2025: Winning the International Programmers Tournament

On December 14, 2025, artificial intelligence won for the first time in a major international competition for real-time programming. ALE-Agent - an AI agent from Japanese startup Sakana AI - took first place in the 4-hour AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058 (AHC058) tournament, beating 804 human programmers.

As follows from the Sakana AI blog, the tournament was AHC058 held on the Japanese online platform AtCoder. Participants needed to solve the complex combinatorial problem of optimizing the hierarchical production process, where machines produce other machines.

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Фото: Freepik

ALE-Agent began sending decisions two hours after the start of the competition and took the lead. The main competition unfolded with one of the strongest programmers under the nickname yosupo. An hour and a half before the end of the tournament, ALE-Agent finally gained a foothold in the first position.

The victory cost Sakana AI about $1.3 thousand - the cost of calls to the application programming interfaces (APIs) of the GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro models that underlie the AI agent.

The key achievement was that AI independently developed an algorithm that was not provided for by the authors of the task. Instead of standard approaches such as the "greedy" method or beam search, ALE-Agent created a unique heuristic method called "Virtual Power." This algorithm allowed the AI agent to evaluate the effectiveness of machines that have not yet been launched into production as if they were already functioning.

ALE-Agent also implemented non-standard local search operations to dramatically restructure the production plan. The author of the problem, Hiromi Notide, admitted that he considered it extremely difficult for large language models and was amazed by the result.

Experts at METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research), an independent research organization that evaluates AI capabilities, note that victory is an important milestone, but not a tipping point. The virtual rating of the ALE-Agent in the general AtCoder table corresponds to only 66 places among active users. In previous tournaments, the AI agent held positions from 8 to 53.^[1]

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