the problem, as well as a deep comprehension of a wide range of algorithms and data structures.
This leap is a signiﬁcant diﬀerence from previous works, which tend to explicitly specify what to
implement. The algorithm must also be eﬃcient enough to execute in time for the input sizes and
time limits speciﬁed by the problem,5 which often eliminates easier, naive attempts.
Finally, the algorithm must be implemented. Implementation eﬃciency matters given execution time
constraints (harder problems can sometimes only be solved in faster languages such as C++), subtle
edge cases can be diﬃcult to account for, and the solution itself can be over a hundred lines of precise
code. Participants are given small example test cases to run against, and often debug, ﬁx, and rerun
their candidate submission many times before attempting an oﬃcial submission against the hidden
tests cases. An example correct solution generated by AlphaCode for the problem in Figure 2 is given
alphacode