The AI astronomer: MadEvolve’s rewrite of cosmology

Space.com reports on MadEvolve, an AI framework that uses Large Language Models as mutation operators within evolutionary programming to iteratively mutate and improve cosmology code. By evaluating new program variants with physics-based metrics, it has delivered substantial gains over human-crafted baselines—such as reconstructing the universe’s initial conditions—and even uncovered thousands of anomalies in archival Hubble data. Built as a general framework, MadEvolve could extend to other scientific fields, signaling a future where AI acts as a tireless, collaborative researcher in astronomy and beyond.