Amplifying human performance in combinatorial competitive programming

Understand

Recent years have seen a significant surge in complex AI systems for competitive programming, capable of performing at admirable levels against human competitors.

• While steady progress has been made, the highest percentiles still remain out of reach for these methods on standard competition platforms such as Codeforces.
• Here we instead focus on combinatorial competitive programming, where the target is to find as-good-as-possible solutions to otherwise computationally intractable problems, over specific given inputs.
• We hypothesise that this scenario offers a unique testbed for human-AI synergy, as human programmers can write a backbone of a heuristic solution, after which AI can be used to optimise the scoring function used by the heuristic.