Polish programmer Przemysław Dębiak took first place in the prestigious AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025. He defeated not only top competitors from around the world but also an artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI. His impressive victory was personally acknowledged by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The tournament brought together the 12 best programmers around the world for a high-stakes competition. Among them was a custom-built AI contestant from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. In the 10-hour-long Heuristic Contest, participants were challenged to solve a complex optimization problem involving robot navigation on a 30×30 grid. The goal of the competition was to optimize the given code as effectively as possible, improving and increasing its efficiency.
Przemysław Dębiak outperformed everyone, including the AI, by scoring an impressive 1.8 trillion points, compared to the AI’s 1.65 trillion. His victory was not only the result of technical skills but also of creativity and unconventional thinking — qualities highlighted by both the organizers and fellow competitors.
Even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, acknowledged the achievement, posting on X (formerly Twitter): “Good job, Psyho.”
Known in the competitive programming community as “Psyho,” Dębiak formerly worked at OpenAI. His win is being celebrated as a symbolic moment, reminding the tech world that human innovation still leads the way.
“Humanity has prevailed (for now!) I’m completely exhausted. I figured I had 10 hours of sleep in the last three days and I’m barely alive. I’ll post more about the contest when I get some rest. (To be clear, those are provisional results, but my lead should be big enough),” the Polish programmer wrote on his profile on X.
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