Will AI Kill Competitive Programming?

Recently, I have been getting a lot of questions from competitive programming enthusiasts or people who are thinking about starting about the effect of AI on competitive programming. My opinion, in summary, is that AI will not end competitive programming. It will draw away some people's attention from it and it will change the platforms and the systems built around it but it will not end the sport.

AI & Competitive Programming Competitions

I think that AI will have a very similar effect on competitive programming to the one it had on chess. AI advancement hasn't killed chess, and I believe it never will. AI has introduced some cheating challenges on online chess platforms, but it has also been useful to some extent in cheating detection systems. When it comes to onsite competitions, AI has had a negligible effect on players but has been helpful for practice and analysis.

So I think that cheating using AI will increase; on the other hand, AI-powered cheating detection systems will continue to improve. I think that onsite contests will remain almost the same, except for some AI tooling that may be used for testing solutions and analyzing results.

There are many other types of sports/competitions (e.g., Cybersecurity, Game Development, etc.) that AI will have similar effects on except that using AI may not be considered cheating in some of them. There will be an increasing number of AI competitions (Kaggle-like) that test participants' knowledge of building AI models, fixing them, and reasoning about them due to AI’s growing importance. Those interested in such areas should consider joining these competitions. These events may attract some people who would otherwise have participated in traditional competitive programming.

Competitive Programming & Joining Big Companies

Don’t start practising competitive programming solely for the purpose of passing interviews, as it is overkill for that purpose. Furthermore, interview styles are not guaranteed to remain the same. A single trend from one of the big players could change interview styles entirely, as has already happened in the past with IQ-style questions.

What's the Purpose of Competitive Programming?

For me, competitive programming is a mind sport that people who truly enjoy will always find ways to practice. This sport enhances your mind’s capabilities by enabling it to dig deeper and deeper to find solutions, thus improving your general problem-solving skills. It also enhances your self-learning skills, as you’ll need to unblock yourself and find different ways to understand algorithms you didn’t write or tutorials you couldn’t grasp on the first read. Additionally, it boosts your teamwork skills if you participate in team contests.