Part 5 of 8

The Maths III: Inside the SOTA Methods

The Papers & Sources part tells the story of the modern methods; this section shows their actual mathematics. Each of the five ideas below changes one specific piece of the machinery you already know — a prior, a search region, an acquisition weight, or the surrogate itself. Nothing here requires more than Maths I and II.

1. The √d fix: why vanilla GPs drown, and the prior that saves them
2. SAASBO: sparsity as a prior
3. TuRBO: the trust-region algebra
4. πBO: folding expert beliefs into the acquisition
5. PFNs: surrogates without fitting
6. Quiz: 5 questions