OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution

It doesn't mention it in the article, but guessing this is based on / inspired by AlphaEvolve?

Though I'm not sure the public can access AlphaEvolve yet.

(https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131)

Very interesting that the LLM weights are co-evolved and reasoning skills improve!

Some cool optimisations here: MAP elites, island models to prevent premature convergence & fast rejection of bad candidates.

What's particularly interesting is the meta level insight: The system discovered scipy.optimize.SLSQP for circle packing - a completely different algorithmic paradigm than it started with. It's genuinely discovering new approaches, not just parameter-tuning.

Sakana.ai improved on this by honing in on sample efficiency iirc with shinkaevolve (which is open source and not an ai slop project)