Comment by Vetch

I'm not sure that's the fully right mental model to use. They're not searching randomly with unbounded compute nor selecting from arbitrary strategies in this example. They are both using LLMs and likely the same ones, so will likely uncover overlapping possible solutions. Avoiding that depends on exploring more of the tail of the highly correlated to possibly identical distributions.

It's a subtle difference from what you said in that it's not like everything has to go right in a sequence for the defensive side, defenders just have to hope they committed enough into searching such that the offensive side has a significantly lowered chance of finding solutions they did not. Both the attackers and defenders are attacking a target program and sampling the same distribution for attacks, it's just that the defender is also iterating on patching any found exploits until their budget is exhausted.