Anyone who has taken a basic computer science class has undoubtedly spent time devising a sorting algorithm—code that will take an unordered list of items and put them in ascending or descending ...

“Sorting is still one of the most widely ... and placing them in order so that the resulting lines of code make up an algorithm. AlphaDev wins the game if the algorithm is both correct and ...

It’s useful to have AI come up with a new sorting algorithm; it’s a much bigger deal to build an AI that can learn how to write state-of-the-art code across ... like C++ or Python mask the ...

but these are important because they’re used by algorithms that sort longer lists. AlphaDev operated at the level of assembly instructions: code generated by automated compilers from code that ...