Packing a Punch: How Model‑Based AI Outperformed Decades of Sphere‑Packing Theory
Packing a Punch: How Model-Based AI Outperformed Decades of Sphere-Packing Theory Expensive experiments have a nasty habit: they punish enthusiasm. In many AI success stories, the hidden luxury is cheap feedback. Generate a million candidates, test them quickly, keep the survivors, call it discovery. This is the comfortable world of many coding benchmarks, puzzle solvers, and evolutionary search systems. It is not the world of high-precision semidefinite programming, where evaluating one candidate can take days and where a bad guess does not merely waste a GPU minute; it quietly burns a serious slice of the research budget. ...