On: Deepmind Alphadev: Faster sorting algorithms disco...

[gumby]

Your description makes the approach sound like applying ca 1980s simulated annealing, also a form of gradient descent. Am I missing something?

[ska → gumby]

This doesn't really sound like SA, which is a principled approach to avoid the local min problem in descent algorithms and end up with a true global optimization. The general result is clean and impractical, the approximations hard to analyze.