ShinkaEvolve in Action: How a Human-AI Partnership Conquered a Coding Challenge

Sakana AI ● 5 sources

Takuya Akiba's competitive programming team used Sakana AI's ShinkaEvolve framework to optimize their code for the 2025 ICFP Programming Contest, winning first place. The system performed 320 trials at a cost of $60, achieving up to 10x speedup on their SAT solver by discovering a more efficient intermediate representation for the maze topology encoding. This collaboration enabled the team to solve previously intractable large-scale problems and provided insights that the human programmers then applied to other challenges.