At the 2025 AtCoder World Tour Finals (AWTF) in Tokyo, Psyho, a 42-year-old programmer from Gdynia, Poland, made history by defeating OpenAI’s custom AI model to win the competition.
Considered one of the most prestigious programming competitions in the world, the event invites 12 top human programmers and an AI competitor to tackle extremely challenging tasks.
After 10 hours of hackathon,PsyhoIt beat AI by about 9.5% and won first place, while OpenAI’s model took second place.
Psyho said on social media: "Humanity wins (at least for now)!" He admitted that he only slept about 10 hours in the three days leading up to the competition, pushing himself to the limit.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded: "Well done, Psyho."
This year's challenge requires contestants to plan a robot's path on a 30×30 grid using as few moves as possible, an NP-hard optimization problem with countless possible outcomes.
Before the competition, OpenAI's AI model OpenAIAHC was considered dominant in the competition, but Döbiak's innovative, heuristic-driven approach - using problem-solving shortcuts and educated guesses rather than brute force calculations - ensured he won the competition.
Tournament administrator Yoichi Iwata praised his unique approach, noting that the AI excelled at raw optimization but fell short in "human creativity."
Psyho, a former OpenAI engineer who helped develop OpenAI Five, used Visual Studio Code to compete, relying only on basic autocomplete, and admitted that the AI pushed him to his limits: "My score was close to the model's score, which pushed me to give it my all."
At the final stage of the 10-hour marathon, he surpassed OpenAIAHC to win the race and the 500,000 yen prize.
