arxiv.org/abs/2610.30223 How Prompt Style Affects AI Accuracy and Speed in Competitive Programming
An exploratory study tested nine prompt styles on GPT-5.5 across three IOI accuracy tasks and two NP-hard speed tasks. No single prompt won; the best depended on task type and mean versus median, and outlier runs skewed averages. Against human IOI contestants, the AI beat the average on one task and trailed on two.
— via arXiv Software Engineering, Saad B. Alarifi, Mohammed A. Alam
