What fifteen years in the ICPC changed about how I solve problems
Reflections across competing, coaching, judging, organizing, and teaching—and what those roles reveal about the real work of problem solving.
Read the note →I’m Christian Yongwhan Lim. I help teams turn ambitious AI products into dependable systems through architecture, evaluation, observability, and recovery.
Chief Architect at Probook · Adjunct at Columbia · Director of Internships at the ICPC Foundation. Formerly Google Research and Two Sigma.
Architecture, evaluation, observability, workflow state, latency, and recovery across the full system—not only the model.
Discuss the system → 02 · LearningCurriculum, deliberate practice, coaching, feedback loops, mentorship, and durable community leadership.
Compare approaches → 03 · CollaborationSpeaking and substantive collaboration on AI reliability, engineering leadership, problem solving, and technical education.
Explore a fit →“He has had a bigger impact in that short time than almost anyone has had in the history of North America.”
A reproducible, multi-model evaluation program for identity, voice, conversational continuity, and drift—shared at a deliberately public-safe level.
80/80 reproducibility checks · honest baselines · calibrated operating guidance Explore the public overview →Hardness, approximation, structural laws, and network augmentation supported by exact computation.
ITCS 2027 submitted · two focused manuscripts in preparationSee the research program →Adversarial validation and release discipline for high-stakes programming contests.
17-problem regional draft · automated checks + human sign-offSee the engineering approach →Reflections across competing, coaching, judging, organizing, and teaching—and what those roles reveal about the real work of problem solving.
Read the note →The scoreboard records outcomes. A useful review reconstructs the decisions, failure modes, and team interactions that produced them.
Read the note →