OpenAI and Google LLC today disclosed that their latest reasoning models achieved gold-level performance in a recent coding competition.
The ICPC, as the event is called, is the world’s most prestigious college-level programming contest. It draws participants from about 3,000 universities. OpenAI says its reasoning models achieved a perfect score, while Google’s algorithm solved 10 of the 12 problems in this year’s contest.
The ICPC finals took place on Sept. 4. The 139 participating teams had five hours to solve the dozen questions that the contest’s organizers included in the test. Had the AI-generated submissions from OpenAI and Google been produced by humans, they would have won first and second place, respectively.
Both companies’ algorithms successfully solved Problem C, which none of the participating teams answered correctly. The task was to calculate the most efficient way of filling a set of reservoirs. “Problem C required finding a solution for distributing liquid through a network of interconnected ducts to a set of reservoirs, with the goal of finding a configuration of these ducts that fills all the reservoirs as quickly as possible,” Google DeepMind researchers detailed in a blog post today.
The company entered the contest with an “advanced” version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think, a reasoning model it introduced in April. The algorithm tackles complex problems by generating a large number of potential answers in parallel. It then refines those answers and distills them into a single response.
According to Google, the version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think that participated in the ICPC used AI agents to generate multiple potential solutions to each problem. The agents had access to a terminal that enabled them to run and test code. After producing the initial code, they made refinements to improve the quality of the test responses.
“Achieving gold-medal level at the ICPC has immediate, practical consequences for software development,” the Google researchers wrote. “Beyond math and coding, our achievement demonstrates a powerful new capability in abstract reasoning. The skills needed for the ICPC — understanding a complex problem, devising a multi-step logical plan and implementing it flawlessly — are the same skills needed in many scientific and engineering fields.”
OpenAI participated in the ICPC with GPT-5 and an experimental reasoning model that isn’t yet publicly available. GPT-5 solved 11 of the 12 problems with the reasoning model’s help. The latter algorithm answered the last question, which was the most difficult of the set, on its own.
The milestone comes two months after models developed by Google and OpenAI won gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad. The search giant disclosed today that it used a version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Thinking in the contest.
Image: Google
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