Can they propose a working novelty:
-- after deep thought about idea soundness, probably not at this stage
-- through cycles of trials, not knowing exactly why - probably yes
After all, your hammer needs not intelligence.
So, "perform a selection over the enumerated combinations in the solutions space" works without the process being further sophisticated. It works as much as it can - as a preparation of data until the stage in which intelligence is required.
We have been doing it since a while; simulated annealing, genetic algorithms... Dumb hammers in a way, encoding an action from an intelligent operator, and providing an effective aid when under intelligent control.
Pretty much no inventions were invented just by thinking, which is the environment most LLMs have.
right now you ask llm to write a code to do basic web scraping for HN website for latest url and give username of the submitter. sure they will give you a code and give you a test script but you as the user have to run the script and give manual feedback to LLM. if the testing step can be automated, user would give an input and desired output or a prompt and choose between the results, that would be good.
kinda like you do inpainting and outpainting and other painting stuff but for code.
feedback is the key here as you said
I was a big fan of genetic programming, wrote a lot of code, did lots of research. And unlike LLMs it could end up on code that had never been written before that accomplished some task, but the random walk through a galactic sized space with atom (or maybe molecule) sized solution spaces made it computationally infeasible.
Being able to somehow code 'reasoning' one could do the equivalent of gradient descent to converge on a working solution but without that, you are unlikely[1] to find anything in reasonable amounts of time.
[1] The chance is non-zero but it is very very near zero.
But it also appear to have a far higher probability of producing changes that move towards something that will run.
What is the human mind if not a computer?
What is the universe if not repeated regurgitations of the four fundamental forces and 12 particles?
Well criticized combinations of existing patterns
> What is the human mind if not a computer
A computer with important modules installed
> What is the universe if not repeated regurgitations of the four fundamental forces and 12 particles
Repeated regurgitations which have already produced working structures
Don't misunderstand, building systems models using existing system response as a way of analyzing those systems is a useful methodology and it makes some things otherwise tedious things not so tedious. Much like "high level" languages removed the tedium of writing in assembly code. But for the same reason that a compiler won't emit a new, more powerful, CPU instruction in its code generator, LLMs don't generate previously unseen system responses.