[ExI] Modern day John Henry

[Stuart LaForge]

Recently a Polish programmer and former employee of OpenAI named 
Przemysław Dębiak (known as "Psyho"), narrowly defeated the custom AI 
model entered by his former employers in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 
2025 Heuristic programming contest in Tokyo.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship/

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"Humanity has prevailed (for now!)," wrote Dębiak on X, noting he had 
little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. 
"I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive."

The competition required contestants to solve a single complex 
optimization problem over 600 minutes. The contest echoes the American 
folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a 
steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry's legendary 
battle against industrial automation, Dębiak's victory represents a 
human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits to prove that 
human skill still matters in an age of advancing AI.

Both stories feature exhausting endurance contests—Henry drove steel 
spikes for hours until his heart gave out, while Dębiak coded for 10 
hours on minimal sleep. The parallel extends to the bittersweet nature 
of both victories: Henry won his race but died from the effort, 
symbolizing the inevitable march of automation, while Dębiak's 
acknowledgment that humanity prevailed "for now" suggests he recognizes 
this may be a temporary triumph against increasingly capable machines.
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Sam Altman was reported to be in utter shock. I wonder if he might hire 
this guy back.

Stuart LaForge