Having just read the problem, I'm curious how o3 solved it (and the human too tbh). My experience with LLMs says they'd be absolute complete crap at this, it's a very hard and open-ended problem. Intuitively I'd say it would just end up doing random changes tryjng to improve its score.

I think I could write the "trivial" solution but anything beyond seems... difficult. Congrats to the winner!