Can AI Assist in Olympiad Coding

Abstract

As artificial intelligence programs have become more powerful, their capacity for problem-solving continues to increase, approaching top-level competitors in many olympiads. Continued development of models and benchmarks is important but not the focus of this paper. While further development of these models and benchmarks remains critical, the focus of this paper is different: we investigate how AI can assist human competitors in high-level coding contests. In our proposed workflow, a human expert outlines an algorithm and subsequently relies on an AI agent for the implementation details. We examine whether such human-AI collaboration can streamline the problem-solving process and improve efficiency, highlighting the unique challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into competitive programming contexts.