Polish programmer beats OpenAI in 10-hour programming marathon

Psyho, a 42-year-old programmer from Gdynia, Poland, made history at the 2025 AtCoder World Tour Finals (AWTF) in Tokyo, beating AI by about 9.5% to win first place, while OpenAI's model took second place.Psyho said on social media, " Humanity wins (at least for now)!" He admitted that he pushed himself to the limit by sleeping only about 10 hours in the three days leading up to the competition. This year's challenge required participants to plan the path of a robot on a 30×30 grid using as few moves as possible, an NP-hard optimization problem with a myriad of possible outcomes. Prior to the competition OpenAI's AI model OpenAIAHC was tipped to dominate, but Psyho's innovative, heuristic-driven approach - using shortcuts and educated guesses to solve the problem rather than brute force computation - ensured he won. - ensured that he won the tournament. Competition administrator Yoichi Iwata praised his unique approach, noting that the AI excelled in raw optimization but fell short in "human creativity.