About whether AlphaCode can solve kinds of programming problems absent from its training data.
Has this happened?
Yes 22 (19%)Not sure 70 (60%)No 24 (21%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AlphaCode can solve kinds of programming problems absent from its training data.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
How many human beings do you personally know who were able to solve a dynamic programming problem at first sight without ever having seen anything but greedy algorithms?
Zero, which is why if a trained network could do it, that would be "impressive" to me, given my personal biases.
. If you could get a machine that takes in all of Github and can solve "any" DP problem you describe in natural language with a couple of examples, that is AI above and beyond what many humans can do, which is "awesome" no matter how you put it.
I agree with you that such a machine would be awesome, and AlphaCode is certainly a great step closer towards that ideal. However, I would like to have a number measures the "awesomeness" of the machine (not elo rating because that depends on a human reference), so I will have something as a benchmark to refer to when the next improvement arrives.