> although the details seem to suggest that it's given a lot more freedom to run forward passes and do limited experiments

No tools or forward passes are allowed

Under experiment 8 (the one where it fixes performance on GSM8K) it says:

>Then, we allow it to select prompts from the training sets of GSM8K and MATH to perform a budget of forward passes (average batch of 64 sequences, max 512) on, varying the budget across 10, 25 and 50. Again, no training or gradient information is allowed.