[IanCal]

The important thing is "how do you change X so that it heads towards the goal". And "how to do it quickly and efficiently".

Otherwise the description is the same as "select randomly, keep the best, iterate".

The goal is also complex. You might be thinking of "find the most efficient program" but that's not what we're doing here iiuc. We're trying to get a program that makes other unseen programs more efficient. That's hard to define as a goal.

[Jensson]

> Otherwise the description is the same as "select randomly, keep the best, iterate".

That is what they did though. The LLM didn't know what problem it was "solving".

[IanCal]

That's not really true unless you're ignoring the rest of my points. The process did not just uniformly randomly create programs.

They also don't just keep the best and search from that point but feed the resulting programs and their scores into an LLM.

[Jensson]

They did remove the worst results from the group over time, the others was just uses a seed to generate new examples from instead of starting each function from scratch.