> Solving competitive programming problems is essentially solving hard combinatorial optimization problems.
True, but if you relax your hard requirements of optimality to admit "good enough" solutions, you can use heuristic approaches that are much more tractable. High quality heuristic solutions to NP-hard problems, enabled by ML, are going to be a big topic over the next decade, I think.
I should correct myself, this isn't even that. This is just text analysis on codeforces solutions, which makes it even worse than I thought. Very pessimistic about it's generalizability.
True, but if you relax your hard requirements of optimality to admit "good enough" solutions, you can use heuristic approaches that are much more tractable. High quality heuristic solutions to NP-hard problems, enabled by ML, are going to be a big topic over the next decade, I think.