Towards Automating Long-Horizon Algorithm Engineering for Hard Optimization Problems

Sakana AI ● 5 sources

Sakana AI developed ALE-Agent, an AI coding agent that achieved 21st place out of 1,000 participants in a live AtCoder Heuristic Competition on May 18, 2025, competing on NP-hard optimization problems. The agent was built on Gemini 2.5 Pro with domain-specific prompts and inference-time scaling, and demonstrated its capability by iteratively refining solutions through techniques like Poisson distribution approximation and simulated annealing optimization. This represents progress in automating algorithm discovery for real-world optimization problems in logistics, factory planning, and power-grid balancing.