Winner Achieves Approx. 51.6x Speedup! Fixstars Acceleration Contest 2026 Results Announced
University of Tokyo Graduate Student Takuya Inoue Claims Back-to-Back Championship, Prevailing Over a Record 179 Participants
IRVINE, California – Mar 18, 2026 – Fixstars Corporation (TSE Prime: 3687, US Headquarters: Irvine, CA), a leading company in performance engineering technology, is pleased to announce that Takuya Inoue has won the Fixstars Acceleration Contest 2026, held from February 19 to March 2, 2026, prevailing over 179 participants to claim his second consecutive championship.
The contest challenges participants to write programs that solve a given problem as fast as possible, competing on execution speed. This was the second edition of the contest. Entries exceeded 100 within just one day of registration opening, and a total of 179 participants (170 students and 9 exhibition entrants) engaged in a fiercely competitive event, surpassing last year's turnout.
Fixstars Acceleration Contest 2026: Overview
The Fixstars Acceleration Contest is a program acceleration contest for students, organized by Fixstars Corporation. Following its inaugural edition in 2024, this year marked the second edition. The 2026 contest featured two participation categories: the Main Competition, open exclusively to students residing in Japan, and the Exhibition, open to non-student participants as well.
Registration Open: February 17, 2026 (Tue)
Submission Period: February 19, 2026 (Thu) – March 2, 2026 (Mon)
Registered Participants: 179 (Main Competition: 170 / Exhibition: 9)
Submissions Received: 111 (Main Competition: 107 / Exhibition: 4)
Prize Winners
The top finishers were separated by mere fractions of a millisecond in an exceptionally high-level competition. Winners other than the champion are listed by their handles.
| 1st Place (Prize: JPY 500,000) |
Takuya Inoue (yokozuna57) The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, Ph.D. Program, 3rd Year |
| 2nd Place (Prize: JPY 200,000) | CleverElsie |
| 3rd Place (Prize: JPY 100,000) | EK55 |
| 4th Place (Prize: JPY 50,000) | Jinapetto |
| 5th Place (Prize: JPY 10,000) | rogi52 |
Commentary
The Challenge: This year’s problem, titled “Assemble the Ultimate Party!” combined clique search in graph theory with constraint evaluation across 128 dimensions, demanding both sophisticated algorithms and exceptional implementation skills.
Champion Inoue processed the LARGE case (N=64) in an average of 0.198 ms—an extraordinary speed approximately 51.6 times faster than the overall median of 10.240 ms among all submissions. His solution exemplified the essence of performance engineering: leveraging the AVX-512 instruction set, converting recursion to a non-recursive DFS with manual stack management, and reordering constraint dimensions to prioritize the most restrictive checks—squeezing every millisecond of potential from the hardware.
While Inoue’s performance stood well above the field, the race for second place and below was extremely close, with each finalist demonstrating distinctive and highly refined optimization techniques.
Comment from Champion Takuya Inoue
“The Fixstars Acceleration Contest offers a refreshingly different way to engage with problems compared to regular competitive programming, and I find it truly enjoyable. I am delighted to have won for the second consecutive year. Next time, I will be participating in the professional category, and I very much look forward to it.”
Related Press Release:
Aim for the World’s Fastest Code! Student Program Acceleration Contest 2026 Announced (February 17, 2026)
https://news.fixstars.com/6159/
About Fixstars Corporation
Fixstars is a technology company dedicated to accelerating AI inference and training through advanced software optimization solutions. It supports innovation in healthcare, manufacturing, finance, mobility, and other industries. For more information, visit: https://www.fixstars.com/