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ajross04/02/20253 repliesview on HN

I tend to wonder if stuff like this is an informative boundary on AI capabilities. I mean, you can't ask a LLM today to do that (AFAICT). "Here's a simply-specified but extremely broad search space, solve this problem in it" isn't something that fits the model. But it's a relatively common (if not "easy") task human beings like to show off.

What needs to change to enable this kind of exploration?


Replies

JohnKemeny04/02/2025

Is it impossible, in this day and age, to enjoy a post without thinking about LLMs? It's like an obsession.

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abeppu04/02/2025

Actually, the (in)famous "sparks of general intelligence paper" about GPT-4 included tasks such as "Draw a unicorn in TikZ" which really is not that far off from this task. There were also examples for drawing cars/trucks/cats etc with SVG.

But I do think that evolutionary algorithms or MCMC variants could do a better job of this, especially if paired with an auxiliary model for scoring their intermediate results.

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iamwil04/02/2025

I was thinking it could, actually, given a feedback loop. The tool use would a json that takes 13 circles, each with x, y position, radius, and whether it's filled in or empty, and output an image. It could look at the image and iterate.