> Solving competitive programming problems is essentially solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. True, but if you relax your hard requirements of op

> 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.