Builder Journal · ARC Prize 2026
This is a Builder Journal summary, a step back from inside a competition I am still competing in, with prize money on the line and the deadline getting closer. I have written a handful of dispatches from this one already, each about a specific way it humbled me. This pulls them into one place, along with the lessons that turned out to matter, almost none of which were the ones I expected. You are reading where I was, not where I am, with the parts that are still my edge kept dark.
The competition is the ARC Prize 2026, and it is built around the one thing today's AI is worst at. Hand a child a video game they have never seen, no manual, and within minutes they have worked out the controls, the goal, and what kills them, all by poking at it and watching what happens. That casual act, getting your footing in a world nobody explained to you, is one of the hardest open problems in the field. The benchmark drops an AI into a small game it has never encountered, tells it nothing, and asks it to win by experimenting: take an action, watch the response, form a theory, test it, and build a working picture of a place from a standing start. Humans, including kids, do this comfortably. The most powerful AI systems on earth, for years, scored close to zero. That gap is the whole point. It is the benchmark that refuses to be impressed by how much a model has memorized, because none of it can be memorized.
