#Rist #Kaggle #Kohei Ozaki

Rist's Kaggle Team Secures Gold Medal at NeurIPS 2025 Championship

In a remarkable achievement, Rist, a Kyoto-based company, has announced that its Kaggle Grandmaster, Kohei Ozaki, was part of a team that won the gold medal at the prestigious NeurIPS 2025 - Google Code Golf Championship. This global competition, hosted by Google DeepMind, took place from July 31 to October 30, 2025, and challenged teams to solve 400 tasks by creating the shortest possible Python code.

The competition attracted a massive participation of 1,414 individuals competing in 1,142 teams, showcasing the immense talent in data analysis and coding. Ozaki's team not only competed against seasoned professionals but excelled, ranking 4th overall and clinching the gold medal.

A Unique Challenge in Coding

The nature of this competition, known as code golf, focuses on writing code in the least number of bytes. Participants were permitted to either manually solve the tasks or leverage AI models—a factor that significantly elevated the complexity of the competition. Ozaki emphasized that this dual-approach setting was one of the most challenging aspects of the contest, providing insight into the adaptive capabilities of current AI technologies in handling such specialized coding challenges.

The team's strategy relied heavily on iterative experimentation and the effective communication of specific directives to their AI models. By analyzing the abstract syntax tree of their interim code products, they utilized experience-driven, rule-based prompting to guide their large language models (LLMs) in generating optimal solutions. Despite their eventual loss to a team that adeptly utilized traditional coding methods, they celebrated the success of being the top result among teams solely leveraging AI Agent technology.

Insight into Kaggle

Kaggle is recognized as one of the largest data analysis platforms globally, with over 27 million registered users. These users, referred to as Kaggler, compete in various challenges proposed by businesses and organizations in a contest format. Participants are ranked according to their performance, with designations ranging from Kaggle Novice to Kaggle Grandmaster—a title only achieved by 382 individuals worldwide as of November 2025, marking it as an extraordinary distinction within the AI engineering and data science community.

Rist and Its Innovative Approach

Founded on August 1, 2016, Rist has pioneered a unique recruitment strategy dubbed