alt Hacker NewsEventually the generation and evaluation will be quite fast where testing a million alternatives will be viable. Impressive you suggest that there might be a million alternatives but it would be faster to just read the code and settle on one. How might that be determined? Did the author who wrote the standard library really come up with the best way when writing those functions? Or did they come up with something that seemed alright to ship relative to other ideas people came up with?
I think we need to think outside the box here and realize ideas can be generated, evaluated, and settled upon far faster than any human operates. The idea of doing what a trillion humans evaluating different functions can do is actually realistic with the path of our present technology. We are at the cusp of some very remarkable times, even more remarkable than the innovations of the past 200 years, should we make progress on this effort.
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This comment strikes me as not having a good intuition for how fast the space of possible programs can grow.
If this were viable, we'd all be running Haiku ten times in the time it took to run Opus once, but nobody does.
A million alternatives is peanuts. Restricting the search space to text files with 37 possible symbols (letters, numbers, space), a million different files can be generated with just 4 symbols.
A trillion is 8 symbols. You still haven't reached the end of your first import statement.
I just took a random source file on my computer. It has about 8000 characters. The number of possible files with 8000 characters has 12500 digits.
At this point, restricting the search space to syntactically valid programs (how do you even randomly generate that?) won't make a difference.