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Sakana AILinkedIn

Our AI agent has achieved 1st place in a competitive optimization programming contest against over 800 human participants.

Source

LinkedInJan 5, 2026
likes
166
comments
5

Post

Our AI agent has achieved 1st place in a competitive optimization programming contest against over 800 human participants. Blog: https://sakana.ai/ahc058 In AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058, Sakana AI’s ALE-Agent took the top spot. For context on the difficulty of these challenges, an OpenAI agent secured 2nd place in the AHC world tournament last year. The task was a 4-hour production planning optimization challenge. While the problem setters anticipated a standard approach combining constructive heuristics and simulated annealing, our agent independently discovered a more effective strategy. It implemented a "virtual power" heuristic and a diverse neighborhood search that allowed it to escape local optima better than human experts. This was achieved through inference time scaling using multiple frontier AI models. The agent ran parallel code generation, analyzed the results, and iteratively refined its algorithms in real time. The total cost was approximately $1,300. This result suggests AI agents can now match top human experts in tasks requiring extended reasoning and original scientific discovery. Please read our blog for more details. We extend our deepest thanks to the host, ALGO ARTIS CORPORATION, and AtCoder Inc. We will continue to research AI as a partner that expands human exploration to discover solutions to complex real-world problems.

linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7413963305242980352Read the full source

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Signal
LinkedIn

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Tags

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Research & Development
  • Product Development
  • Automation

Extraction

Detected
Jan 8, 2026
signal_type
linkedin-post-company
signal_subtype
linkedinPost

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This page shows a preview. The full linkedin-post-company record in the Signal API and MCP can also have these 8 fields. Some fields are empty for some signals.

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  • linkedin_urlValue in the API
  • industriesValue in the API
  • employee_count_lowValue in the API
  • employee_count_highValue in the API
  • revenueValue in the API
  • descriptionValue in the API

Signal

  • signal_nameValue in the API
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GET /v1/signals/3b0c17e2-d8a2-4452-9e82-a5d81c05b6b5 returns this record as JSON. POST /v1/companies/enrich returns every signal for sakana.ai.

{
  "signal_id": "3b0c17e2-d8a2-4452-9e82-a5d81c05b6b5",
  "signal_type": "linkedin-post-company",
  "signal_subtype": "linkedinPost",
  "detected_at": "2026-01-08T12:20:27.622+00:00",
  "company": {
    "name": "Sakana AI",
    "domain": "sakana.ai"
  },
  "data": {
    "tags": [
      "Artificial Intelligence",
      "Research & Development",
      "Product Development",
      "Automation"
    ],
    "post_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7413963305242980352/",
    "num_likes": 166,
    "post_text": "Our AI agent has achieved 1st place in a competitive optimization programming contest against over 800 human participants. Blog: https://sakana.ai/ahc058\n\nIn AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058, Sakana AI’s ALE-Agent took the top spot. For context on the difficulty of these challenges, an OpenAI agent secured 2nd place in the AHC world tournament last year.\n\nThe task was a 4-hour production planning optimization challenge. While the problem setters anticipated a standard approach combining constructive heuristics and simulated annealing, our agent independently discovered a more effective strategy. It implemented a \"virtual power\" heuristic and a diverse neighborhood search that allowed it to escape local optima better than human experts.\n\nThis was achieved through inference time scaling using multiple frontier AI models. The agent ran parallel code generation, analyzed the results, and iteratively refined its algorithms in real time.\n\nThe total cost was approximately $1,300.\n\nThis result suggests AI agents can now match top human experts in tasks requiring extended reasoning and original scientific discovery. Please read our blog for more details.\n\nWe extend our deepest thanks to the host, ALGO ARTIS CORPORATION, and AtCoder Inc. We will continue to research AI as a partner that expands human exploration to discover solutions to complex real-world problems.",
    "posted_date": "2026-01-05T15:23:16.747Z",
    "num_comments": 5
  }
}

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