Calling it now - RL finally "just works" for any domain where answers are easily verifiable. Verifiability was always a prerequisite, but the difference from prior generations (not just AlphaGo, but any nontrivial RL process prior to roughly mid-2024) is that the reasoning traces and/or intermediate steps can be open-ended with potentially infinite branching, no clear notion of "steps" or nodes and edges in the game…
Skimmed quickly the paper. This does not look like RL. It's a genetic algorithm. In a previous life I was working on compbio (protein structure prediction), we built 100s of such heuristic based algorithm (monte carlo simulated annealing, ga..). The moment you have a good energy function (one that provide some sort of gradient), and a fast enough sampling function (llms), you can do looots of cool optmization with sufficient compute.
I guess that's now becoming true with LLMs.
Faster LLMs -> More intelligence