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AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

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Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#161

Post by fdej »

> From the paper, "Notably, for multiplying two 4 × 4 matrices, applying the algorithm of Strassen recursively results in an algorithm with 49 multiplications, which works over any field...AlphaEvolve is the first method to find an algorithm to multiply two 4 × 4 complex-valued matrices using 48 multiplications."

...but Waksman's algorithm from 1970 [1] multiplies two 4 x 4 complex-valued matrices using only 46 multiplications (indeed, it works in any ring admitting division by 2).

Sloppy by DeepMind and by Nature to publish such a claim - did they not ask someone knowledgeable about matrix multiplication to review the work?

[1] https://doi.org/10.1109/T-C.1970.222926

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#163

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

I'm sad not to see any mention of numerical stability. One of the hardest parts of all these automatic optimization of numerical algorithms is getting ensuring numerical stability. Once we have a strong handle on getting the best of both of those, it will be a delight.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#166

Post by wbhart »

fdej wrote: post #161

> From the paper, "Notably, for multiplying two 4 × 4 matrices, applying the algorithm of Strassen recursively results in an algorithm with 49 multiplications, which works over any field...AlphaEvolve is the first method to find an algorithm to multiply two 4 × 4 complex-valued matrices using 48 multiplications." ...but Waksman's algorithm from 1970 [1] multiplies two 4 x 4 complex-valued matrices using only 46 multi…

There's even an Open Source implementation of Waksman's in Flint, the package fdej maintains.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#167

Post by james_marks »

pram wrote: post #95
dpflan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not read this linked article, but your comment made me recall a discussion about a speed up of CUDA kernels presented by Sakana AI Labs. The researcher Ravid Shwartz Ziv at NYU posted about it on LinkedIn [1], and here is the Twitter post of interest [2] """ Yesterday's news about Sakana AI Labs provided an important lesson for all of us working with AI agents. Their announcement of an AI system that could sup…

lmao this is exactly the kind of stuff I always see from Claude. It’s like adding a Skip() to a test and declaring it works now. “Well it’s a lot faster, I met the criteria of my TODOs cya” I’ve seen it so much I kinda doubt it was “inadvertent” because they’re like seemingly intentional about their laziness, and will gaslight you about it too.

So annoying. Also, when it hardcodes the expected response in a mock, bypassing the purpose entirely. “Test passes now!”

Funny, 5 years ago we had these same complaints, but about (some) people.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#168

Post by letitgo12345 »

Imnimo wrote: post #94

I'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? H…

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

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#169

Post by drexlspivey »

baq wrote: post #120
Workaccount2 wrote: post #100

Interestingly, it seems alphaevolve has already been in use for a year, and it is just now being publicly shown. The paper also mentions that it uses Gemini 2.0 (pro and flash), which creates a situation where Gemini 2.0 was used in a way to train Gemini 2.5. I don't know if I would call this the fabled "self improving feedback loop", but it seems to have some degree of it. It also begs the question if Alphaevolve wa…

If you have the brain power, the compute and control the hardware, what is there to prevent the take off feedback loop? Deepmind is at this point in the timeline uniquely positioned.

They have been doing this for years. Headline from 2016:

"DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%"

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-go...

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#170

Post by wbhart »

lf88 wrote: post #139
aabajian wrote: post #63

From the paper, "Notably, for multiplying two 4 × 4 matrices, applying the algorithm of Strassen recursively results in an algorithm with 49 multiplications, which works over any field...AlphaEvolve is the first method to find an algorithm to multiply two 4 × 4 complex-valued matrices using 48 multiplications." If you do naive matrix multiplication, you get a sense that you're doing similar work multiple times, but i…

By googling "4x4 matrices multiplication 48" I ended up on this discussion on math.stackexchange https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/578342/number-of-el... , where in 2019 someone stated "It is possible to multiply two 4×4 matrix A,B with only 48 multiplications.", with a link to a PhD thesis. This might mean that the result was already known (I still have to check the outline of the algorithm).

As already noted in a post by fdej further down, Waksman's algorithm from 1970, which works over the complex numbers, requires only 46 multiplications (and I guess, divisions by 2, which may or may not be relevant depending on your actual ring).
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