OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution

53 pointsposted 2 months ago
by codelion
(algorithmicsuperintelligence.ai)

9 Comments

jasonjmcghee

2 months ago

It doesn't mention it in the article, but guessing this is based on / inspired by AlphaEvolve?

Though I'm not sure the public can access AlphaEvolve yet.

(https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131)

gerdesj

2 months ago

If AlphaEvolve is: "a quality-diversity search framework for algorithm discovery" then maybe.

At the moment I'm mildly skeptical and uncertain of whether to twist or stick.

DoctorOetker

2 months ago

Very interesting that the LLM weights are co-evolved and reasoning skills improve!

viraptor

2 months ago

What do you mean by this? I can't find anything there about modifying the used LLMs and the hosted ones wouldn't be possible to change. Do I misunderstand the convolved part you mentioned?

DoctorOetker

2 months ago

you are correct, on re-reading they only evolved the prompts ...

N_Lens

2 months ago

Some cool optimisations here: MAP elites, island models to prevent premature convergence & fast rejection of bad candidates.

What's particularly interesting is the meta level insight: The system discovered scipy.optimize.SLSQP for circle packing - a completely different algorithmic paradigm than it started with. It's genuinely discovering new approaches, not just parameter-tuning.