News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing ... by Imnimo on Wednesday May 14, 2025 @01:47PM (#43987310)
I'm surprised by how little detail is given about the evolution procedure:

>In AlphaEvolve, the evolutionary database implements an algorithm that is inspired by a combination of the MAP elites algorithm [71] and island-based population models [80, 94].

"inspired by" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. How do you choose dimensions of variation to do MAP-elites? How do you combine these two algorithms? How loose is the inspiration? It feels like a lot of the secret sauce is in the answers to these questions, and we get a single paragraph on how the evolution procedure works, which is so vague as to tell us almost nothing.

Re:AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing ... by pilooch on Wednesday May 14, 2025 @04:27PM (#43988816)
Yes the 2023 reference on island based evolution with LLMs (nature article) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06924-6 has more details.

Agreed the dimensions/features are key. These white papers are an insult to science...

Re:AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing ... by letitgo12345 on Wednesday May 14, 2025 @05:33PM (#43989452)
Most straightforward would be to ask the model to generate different evaluation metrics (which they already seem to do) and use each one as one of the dimensions
Re:AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing ... by hariseldom on Thursday May 15, 2025 @03:35PM (#43998482)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.09891v1 from deepmind in January goes into the evolutionary algorithm a bit - no math though.