Aaron Mussig

Sorting algorithm underpins all critical softwares. DeepMind's AlphaDev speeds up sorting small sequences (3-5 items) by 70%. Key takeaways: * The main RL algorithm is based on AlphaZero that originally played Go, Chess & Shogi. Same idea applies to searching programs! * Instead of optimizing over C code, they optimize assembly code instead. It's a deliberate choice to go low-level to squeeze out every instruction saving. * The assembly code is then reverse-engineered by hand to C, and open-sourced in LLVM. * Even though the representation network uses transformer, it is NOT a foundation model. The whole pipeline only works on sorting, and has to be re-trained for other tasks like hashing.