"But here's the thing that gets missed in the narrative:"
That's a pretty big clue that it is LLM assisted at least. That said, I don't mind. The article has substance and other than a few LLM markers like that, I think it's well-written.
I think it's even slow for high schoolers. I didn't practice that much and ran 100m in 12.5s from rest at my peak. 4s slower is snail pace. I think most in my class could run that fast (or slow).
I agree. I ran mid 16s in 8th grade, and was in the 14s in high school, with the only training being whatever we did in gym class. But I do also look at the sheer number of overweight kids these days and figured, well maybe mid-16s is actually a reasonable average point.
For those allergic to LLM writing: Some sentences read very LLM-like, e.g.:
> The fix wasn’t “change one function” — it was “audit the entire call chain from portal request to bubblewrap execution and replace every path string with an fd.”
Commit history looks vibe coded doesn't it? Don't read too much into anything you see there. It's what Claude or Codex wrote after being asked to solve the challenge.
The person who won the challenge with this apparently misleading code seems to have absolutely no quantum computing background. He writes this as background about himself:
> Technology leader with 10+ years in enterprise software, full-stack architecture, and cloud-native development. Background in computer science with hands-on experience across .NET, Python, Rust, and Cloud ecosystems. Currently working as Cloud GTM Specialist focused on solution architecture and sales engineering.
I've been getting lots of refusals by Codex with GPT 5.5 for "biosafety reasons" when asking for harmless things like code to analyze SARS-CoV-2 sequences for breakpoints. That's in no way useful for creating viruses whatsoever - it's pure research.
It's annoying that the refusal is so obviously false positive.
It refuses to write bioinformatics code that involves analysis of SARS-CoV-2. Even when it's totally obvious I'm not trying to do any bioengineering of any sorts. Totally harmless stuff I'm doing and I just get rejected.
Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons.
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