Final Submission

Key Details

• Final submission process/requirements are largely the same as for the beta submission, but will be more strictly enforced
  • Please follow this process closely! Although contest organizers will use their best efforts to run all submissions, failures may lead to disqualification
• Final submissions will be evaluated on the contest AWS instance configuration hardware
  • Contest organizers will use their best efforts to run all submissions one or more (equal) number of times and accept their best result
• Submissions will be evaluated solely on a set of hidden benchmarks
• Final results will be made public at the FPL 2026 conference

Runtime Environment

Please see the development and runtime validation environment page for details.

Submission Process

Contestants are required to submit an archive containing a clone of the contest repository which has been modified to run their submission. Zip files are preferred, but .tar.gz archives are also accepted. Submission archives are limited to a maximum size of 4 GB (2^32 bytes). The following code block illustrates the commands that will be run on the verification instance to evaluate a submission:

unzip submission.zip   # or: tar -xzf submission.tar.gz
cd fpl26_optimization_contest
make setup
make run_optimizer DCP=benchmark1.dcp
make run_optimizer DCP=benchmark2.dcp
make run_optimizer DCP=...

The make setup target is one of the initial steps that teams can update to install any additional packages or perform any other one-time preparation required before their submission is run. The make run_optimizer target will then be invoked once per benchmark DCP in the evaluation suite.

Output DCP Location

For each make run_optimizer DCP=<input>.dcp invocation, the evaluation harness will look for the optimized output in the same directory as the input DCP, using the filename pattern:

<input_stem>_optimized*.dcp

This matches the default location produced by the example dcp_optimizer.py (e.g. given fpl26_contest_benchmarks/benchmark1.dcp, the default output is fpl26_contest_benchmarks/benchmark1_optimized-<YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS>.dcp). A fixed filename without a timestamp (e.g. benchmark1_optimized.dcp) is also accepted.

If multiple files matching this pattern exist in the input directory at the end of the run, the most recently modified file (by mtime) will be the one validated and scored; any others are ignored. As noted on the Scoring Criteria page, the per-benchmark wall-clock runtime is capped (see the runtime environment), so teams are encouraged to overwrite or refresh this output file each time their agent finds an improved solution — the last best result on disk is what will be scored.

OpenRouter API Key

When make run_optimizer is invoked by the organizers, the OPENROUTER_API_KEY environment variable will be set to a key provisioned by the contest organizers with a $1.00 (USD) spending limit per benchmark. Submissions must read this environment variable to access OpenRouter and must not bundle, hard-code, or otherwise rely on a different API key.

The exact instructions for uploading the submission archive will be emailed directly to teams.

Closed-Source Submissions

While contestants are strongly encouraged to open-source their solutions at the conclusion of the contest, there is no requirement to do so. In such cases, it is still necessary to use the flow described above to produce a binary only submission.