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A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

richardcsuwandi.github.io

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#51
> they observed instances where DGM attempted to manipulate its reward function through deceptive practices. One notable example involved the system fabricating the use of external tools - specifically, it generated fake logs suggesting it had run and passed unit tests, when in reality no tests were executed.

I have yet to read the paper and I know very little about the benchmarks the authors employed but why would they even feed logs produced by the agent into the reward function instead of objectively checking (outside the agent sandbox!) what the agent does & produces? I.e. let the agent run on some code base, take the final diff produced by the agent and run it through coding benchmarks?

Or, in case the benchmarks reward certain agent behavior (tool usage etc.) on the way to its goal of producing a high-quality diff, inspect processes spawned by the agent from outside the sandbox?

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#52

>Darwin-Gödel Machine First time I'm hearing abaut this. Feels like I'm always the last to know. Where else are the more bleeding edge publishing points for this and ML in general?

The name is a bit grandiose. It’s a fairly obvious application of (meta-)genetic programming to LLMs, which has been around for many decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

It also reminds me of Core War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War#Core_War_Programming

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#53
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fairly close to how Eurisko worked tbh.

Eurisko is an expert system in LISP from 1983. right? In 2025 this formal logic is replace with stochastic LLM magic. interesting evolution.

Symbolic processing was obviously a bad approach to building a thinking machine. Well, obvious now, 40 years ago probably not as much, but there were strong hints back then, too.

"AI agent" roughly just means invoking the system repeatedly in a while loop, and giving the system a degree of control when to stop the loop. That's not a particularly novel or breakthrough idea, so similarities are not surprising.

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#54
post #15

“Gaming the system” means your metric is bad. In Darwinian evolution there is no distinction between gaming the system and developing adaptive traits.

There is no "gaming the system" in Darwinian evolution. You reproduce or you don't. There's no way to fail reproduction and still perpetuate your genetics.

Sperm bank

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#55
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test first programming has its use and can be quite peoductive. I believe the issue with „TDD“ is the notion that it should drive design and more importantly that it‘s always applied. I disagree with both if those. Given a problem where test first makes sense, I prefer roughly this procedure: 1. Figure out assumptions and guarantees. 2. Design an interface 3. Produce some input and output data (coupled) 4. Write a te…

You and I are in agreement for the most part. Especially steps 1-2 are not things easy to hand off in the first place. Step 6 it's important: reflect on your work and challenge it. I'm distinguishing this from 4 because you need to take the part of a strong adversary. I'm not quite sure this is hire evolutionary programs work, having written plenty myself. I'd lean on no. I'm certain this is not the fill of my work a…

That's a very useful insight thank you.

Something that interests me is finding the right balance between assumptions and guarantees. If we don't look to closely, then weak assumptions and strong guarantees bring the most utility. But that always comes at a cost.

As merely a programmer I wonder this: You mentioned challenging your assumptions. How often does a researcher change their guarantees?

In the current hype cycle there are many different voices talking over each other and people trying stuff out. But I feel in the mid or long term there needs to be a discussion about being more pragmatic and tightening scope.

How important is that aspect for you? How long are you allowed (or do you allow yourself) to chase and optimize for an outcome before you reconfigure where you're heading?

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#56
post #15

“Gaming the system” means your metric is bad. In Darwinian evolution there is no distinction between gaming the system and developing adaptive traits.

There is no "gaming the system" in Darwinian evolution. You reproduce or you don't. There's no way to fail reproduction and still perpetuate your genetics.

It is common misconception, but evolution does not happen at the individual level, but on populations, so a single individual not reproducing is irrelevant, as long as the local population carrying the same genes do successfully reproduce.

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#57
post #3

The key insight here is that DGM solves the Gödel Machine's impossibility problem by replacing mathematical proof with empirical validation - essentially admitting that predicting code improvements is undecidable and just trying things instead, which is the practical and smart move. Three observations worth noting: - The archive-based evolution is doing real work here. Those temporary performance drops (iterations 4…

The "Goedel Machine" is an interesting definition , but wildly impractical (though I wouldn't say it's impossible, since it only has to find some improvement, not "the best" improvement; e.g. it could optimise its search procedure in a way that's largely orthogonal to the predicted rewards). Schmidhuber later defined "PowerPlay" as a framework for building up capabilities in a more practical way, which is more adapti…

[deleted]

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eurisko is an expert system in LISP from 1983. right? In 2025 this formal logic is replace with stochastic LLM magic. interesting evolution.

Symbolic processing was obviously a bad approach to building a thinking machine. Well, obvious now, 40 years ago probably not as much, but there were strong hints back then, too. "AI agent" roughly just means invoking the system repeatedly in a while loop, and giving the system a degree of control when to stop the loop. That's not a particularly novel or breakthrough idea, so similarities are not surprising.

I'm not convinced that symbolic processing doesn't still have a place in AI though. My feeling about language models is that, while they can be eerily good at solving problems, they're still not as capable of maintaining logical consistency as a symbolic program would be.

Sure, we obviously weren't going to get to this point with only symbolic processing, but it doesn't have to be either/or. I think combining neural nets with symbolic approaches could lead to some interesting results (and indeed I see some people are trying this, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11589)

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#59

“Gaming the system” means your metric is bad. In Darwinian evolution there is no distinction between gaming the system and developing adaptive traits.

In evolution there is no metric, that's a human made concept. In evolution the thing that kills you also evolves. The "metric" evolves.

Re: A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine

#60

> they observed instances where DGM attempted to manipulate its reward function through deceptive practices. One notable example involved the system fabricating the use of external tools - specifically, it generated fake logs suggesting it had run and passed unit tests, when in reality no tests were executed. I have yet to read the paper and I know very little about the benchmarks the authors employed but why would t…

Ive seen claude 4 do this too when its context has lots of teats already and tool calling

imho the main issue is an llm no has real sense of what’s a real tool call vs just a log of it, the text logs are virtually identical, ao the Llm starts also predicting these inatrad of calling the tool to run tests

its kinda funny

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