Unlocking Potential with AI: A Case Study from the ICFP 2025 Programming Contest
As a founding Research Scientist at Sakana AI, I’ve long been passionate about competitive programming, a journey that led our team, Team Unagi, to victory at the recent 2025 ICFP Programming Contest. Here’s how we integrated AI into our solution:
- Challenge: Navigate an unknown maze with minimal queries.
- Strategy: Utilized SAT encoding to efficiently derive solutions.
- Innovation: Applied our evolutionary optimization framework, ShinkaEvolve, which enhanced our initial code by iterating through 320 trials to achieve transformative results.
Key Outcomes:
- Achieved up to a 10x speedup in execution times!
- Enabled solving larger problems that were previously unattainable.
This collaboration between human insight and AI evolution not only boosted our competition performance but also enriched our development process.
Interested in how AI can elevate your projects? Share your thoughts below and let’s connect! 🚀
