Ahmed El-Kishky

We have Mark Chen, who is our chief research officer.

And they really like heavily pushed for, you know, starting this work stream.

That's awesome.

Oh, yeah.

So three programming competitions and then one math competition.

So the first one we tried this year.

was Atcoder, which is like this premier competitive programming competition that's held in Japan every year.

The world finals there.

We decided we wanted to mix it up there.

We didn't compete in the traditional algorithmic competitive programming, where there's usually a correct solution, a solution that is able to answer all the questions within a certain time complexity under certain memory constraints.

That's like the traditional programming competition, which is like ICPC or IOI.

This one was a, it's called the heuristic competition.

Heuristics are necessary to solve like these problems that

they're impossible to get a correct answer to.

Like finding the best answer is just fundamentally possible.

Like theoretically, it's difficult to do.

It's super difficult.

And so the best that people can do is writing these heuristics.

There are programs that sort of find better and better solutions, but there's no idea of like a best solution.

And so in these competitions, we were, yeah, we're trying to find like, you know, really good solutions.