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Google’s Deep Think Wins Gold at 'Coding Olympics'

Published SEP 18 2025

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Above: A photo illustration displaying Google Gemini on the App Store of a smartphone. Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The Facts

An advanced version of Google Gemini 2.5 Deep Think solved 10 out of 12 problems at the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Azerbaijan, winning a gold medal and ranking second overall among 139 competing university teams.
Financial Times
The Guardian
Google
The Times of India
The ICPC is considered the world’s most prestigious algorithmic programming competition at the college level, with teams from over 3,400 universities across 103 countries competing in its latest edition.
Worldfinals
Worldfinals
Gemini 2.5 Deep Think competed remotely, following ICPC rules, and solved eight problems within 45 minutes, and completed two more within three hours, for a combined total time of 677 minutes.
Google
Notably, the AI model was able to solve Problem C within 30 minutes (a complex liquid distribution optimization challenge that no human team could complete) using dynamic programming algorithms and nested ternary searches to find the optimal solution.
Google
In a press release, Google described the achievement as demonstrating “a profound leap in abstract problem solving,” with Google DeepMind Vice President Quoc Le comparing it to previous AI breakthroughs such as Deep Blue in 1997 and AlphaGo in 2016.
Google
The Guardian
The Times of India
Google was only bested by OpenAI’s GPT-5, which topped the ICPC rankings with a perfect score after solving all 12 problems, including 11 correctly on the first attempt and the most challenging after the ninth submission.
Mostafa Rohaninejad on X
Openai
Mostafa Rohaninejad on X

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The Spin

Techno-optimist narrative

These AI victories represent a transformative leap toward artificial general intelligence that will revolutionize scientific and engineering disciplines. The genuine creativity and abstract reasoning demonstrated by these models prove that AI can serve as a true problem-solving partner for programmers and researchers.

Google

Techno-skeptic narrative

Although AI is a powerful tool, which demonstrated its prowess at ICPC 2025, those who wield it must remember that it cannot solve every problem the world currently faces. Many of these issues are fundamentally man-made and require human-led solutions — responses crafted through empathy, creativity and engineering — that AI will never be able to replicate.

Wired