Yes. Upon further reflection, this competition actually looks like another step in that direction (see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378423

Yes. Upon further reflection, this competition actually looks like another step in that direction (see this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23784239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23784239). Otherwise I agree, Gaussian Processes are nice and friendly, and work quite well for low-dimensional search (e.g., from a few to hundreds of hyperparameters) under very natural, general assumptions :-)