Definition
Plain language
A DeepMind system that used a language model in a search loop to discover new mathematical functions.
As stated in the literature
A DeepMind LLM-driven evolutionary search system for discovering programs that solve open mathematical problems.
Why it matters: It demonstrated that LLMs inside evolutionary loops could actually discover new mathematical objects, not just summarize known ones.
For example, FunSearch found new constructions for the cap-set problem by having a language model propose candidate code snippets that an evaluator then scored and ranked.
Heard on the show
“That's FunSearch, that's AlphaEvolve, that's a whole cluster of recent work.”Episode 139 — When Optimizing One GPU Kernel Quietly Breaks the Whole System