alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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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
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...