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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

#181

Post by nemonemo »

wbhart wrote: post #178
nemonemo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer says "For rings in which division by 2 is permitted". Is there the same constraint for AlphaEvolve's algorithm? Edit2: Z_2 has characteristics 2. Edit: AlphaEvolve claims it works over any field with characteristic 0. It appears Waksman's could be an existing work. From the AlphaEvolve paper: "For 56 years, designing an algorithm with fewer than 49 multiplications over any field with characteristic 0 was a…

Z_2 has characteristic 2, not 0.

Thank you. Updated my comment again.

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

#182

Post by vessenes »

markisus wrote: post #13

The paper does not give that many details about the evolution part. Normally, evolutionary algorithms contain some cross-over component where solutions can breed with each other. Otherwise it's better classified as hill climbing / beam search.

One intriguing caption mentioned something requiring 16 “mutations”. I’d sure like to know how these mutations work.

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

#183

Post by catigula »

It's hard to stake out a defensible position on bold claims like these because, if they were as presented, it's hard to see how you haven't simply completed runaway AI.

Philosophically, let's say you talk an old LLM through a new discovery. Thanks to your instruction, the LLM now has access to "new" information not in its training data. It is certainly capable of this. The problem in is that this is just laundered human intelligence.

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

#184

Post by antihipocrat »

nowittyusername wrote: post #180

This is an important moment. We now have verifiable evidence that these systems can do new useful research that has actual value in the real world. That 1% savings is only the start as well. I would expect the compounding number of gains to be significant over some time. Also in a way this process was used to make gemini 2.5 pro better, so its like a baby step towards recursive self improvement. Not fully automated y…

Is it new? I'm getting mixed messages from the posts here. On one side there is evidence that 48 and 46 multiplication solutions have been known (and could have found themselves in the model training data).

On the other side I see excitement that the singularity is here.

If the latter were the case surely we wouldn't be reading about it in a published paper, we would already know.

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

#185

Post by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe »

vessenes wrote: post #182
markisus wrote: post #13

The paper does not give that many details about the evolution part. Normally, evolutionary algorithms contain some cross-over component where solutions can breed with each other. Otherwise it's better classified as hill climbing / beam search.

One intriguing caption mentioned something requiring 16 “mutations”. I’d sure like to know how these mutations work.

Seems very exotic for RL or agents, but not for genetic algorithms

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

#186

Post by _delirium »

nowittyusername wrote: post #180

This is an important moment. We now have verifiable evidence that these systems can do new useful research that has actual value in the real world. That 1% savings is only the start as well. I would expect the compounding number of gains to be significant over some time. Also in a way this process was used to make gemini 2.5 pro better, so its like a baby step towards recursive self improvement. Not fully automated y…

Genetic programming systems have periodically made improvements to algorithms (dating back decades). Whether LLM-powered GP, which is effectively what this is, will be a step change or an evolution of that is still an open question I think. I'm also a little wary of reading too much into the recursive self-improvement idea, because "the GP system can use GP to improve the GP system itself!" is a very old idea that just has never worked, although I realize that isn't proof that it won't eventually work.

Some related work from a different company: https://sakana.ai/ai-cuda-engineer/

And some academic papers kind of in this space: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896, https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12170, https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07102

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

#187

Post by latentsea »

chriskanan wrote: post #159
quantumHazer wrote: post #57

Cool, but don't get me wrong, isn't this essentially similar to Google's Co-Scientist, where multiple models are in a loop, passing context back and forth validating things? At its core, it's still a system of LLMs, which is impressive in execution but not fundamentally new. LLMs are undoubtedly useful at tasks like code "optimisation" and detecting patterns or redundancies that humans might overlook, but this announ…

They address this in the AlphaEvolve paper: "While AI Co-Scientist represents scientific hypotheses and their evaluation criteria in natural language, AlphaEvolve focuses on evolving code, and directs evolution using programmatic evaluation functions. This choice enables us to substantially sidestep LLM hallucinations, which allows AlphaEvolve to carry on the evolution process for a large number of time steps."

If they ever do change their stance on that and give in to vibe coding, at least there is the opportunity to brilliantly rebrand as DeepVibe.

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

#188

Post by voidspark »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #153

Why do I get the feeling they are doing the "IBM Watson" thing where different efforts are being put underneath the same brand name? Not saying it is that egregious, but it's a slippery slope from "well, it didn't do all these different things out of the box, unsupervised".

Gemini refers specifically to a family of multimodal LLMs, which is exactly what they are using here.

They have other models with different names used for different purposes.

https://ai.google/get-started/our-models/

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

#189

Post by czl »

geodel wrote: post #154
empath75 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I think the concerns about AI taking people's jobs are overblown. There is not a limited amount of knowledge work to do or things that can be invented or discovered. There's just work that isn't worth the effort, time or money to do right now, it doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's just not cost effective. If you reduce effort, time and money, then suddenly you can do it. Like even just for progr…

It is not some very explicit threshold beyond which AI will take job but before it won't. What's already happening is long drawn attrition where tools at different level of code, low code , no code will keep creeping up. And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop…

> And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether.

Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower") will stop existing?

I do not predict future only look at what happened in the past and my answer to each question above about farming is the opposite what your comment would imply if it was applied to farming.

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