alt Hacker NewsThey address this specifically and hand-wave it away:
Moreover, both random and all other experimentation strategies we examined require constructing a bounded experimental space, a challenge that lies beyond the scope of the current work (see Almaatouq et al., 2024, for further discussion).
That is an unrelated problem, that usually is not even a problem.
For molecules, 10 Armstrong away is probably as good as infinite.
For how many bananas should you eat per week to become the chess world champion, you can ask Wolfram Alpha to convert 2400kcal * 7 to bananas and get an upper bound.
I think everyone agree that with infinite time a resources a brute force search is better in case there is a weird combination. But for finite time and resources you need to select a better strategy unless the search space is ridiculous small and smooth.