AlphaEvolve — Early Generations

Question

What exists beyond the AlphaEvolve clone headline: runnable search infrastructure or demonstrated discovery?

Context

AlphaEvolve is an open implementation of DeepMind’s evolutionary coding-agent pattern and the Club B propose/vary scaffold in the Recursive Self Improvement Lab: island-model populations, LLM mutation and crossover, sandboxed evaluation, and SQLite lineage. The quality bar is not whether the architecture is interesting; it is whether any recorded run discovered something worth promoting under an external evaluator the searcher cannot rewrite.

flowchart LR
  pop["Island population"]
  mutate["LLM mutate / crossover"]
  eval["Sandboxed evaluator"]
  persist["SQLite lineage"]

  pop --> mutate --> eval --> persist --> pop

Findings

• The public engine and problem scaffolds exist: packing 26 circles in a unit square, 10-dimensional Rastrigin, kissing spheres, and small matrix multiplication.
• Selection and persistence machinery (tournament / roulette / rank, SQLite generations) is in place so lineage can survive restarts.
• Recorded runs never progressed past early generations before the project paused — no discovered-program benchmarks are claimed.
• What publishes honestly is infrastructure and reference design; competitive results wait on a revival with sealed run cards.
• For RSI Lab purposes this is a productive negative: evolutionary proposal machinery without held-out inheritance is not recursive self-improvement.

Method

LLM-driven evolutionary search under a sandboxed evaluator. Public surfaces are the open repository and strategy notes on elitism, selection pressure, and exploration. Verdict assignment required recorded run depth, not README aspiration.

Limits

• No competitive discovered-program benchmark is claimed.
• Early generations validate scaffolding, not search quality.
• A revival needs a sealed run card, evaluator fixtures, a baseline, and a promotion gate independent of the mutating model.
• Island-model activity is not archive-conditioned inheritance in the Wave-Causal F3/F4 sense.

Artifact

Repository: a3fckx/alphaevolve. No sealed notebook accompanies this status writeup.