Solving algorithmic tasks by just building a ML model of your competitor's algorithm seems like a funny way to start. I imagine this to be the way "programming"

Solving algorithmic tasks by just building a ML model of your competitor's algorithm seems like a funny way to start. I imagine this to be the way "programming" will stop being a thing in a few hundred years. At the moment for web search it probably would not work, because I imagine from feature extraction to result there are several models involved to create intermediate results.