DeepCoder from Microsoft can leave programmers without work
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad field constituted of many disciplines like robotics or machine learning. The aim of AI is to create machines capable of performing tasks and cognitive functions that are otherwise only within the scope of human intelligence. To get there, machines must be able to learn these opportunities automatically instead of having each of them to be explicitly programmed end-to-end.
Another task of AI is to write programs. Similar technology was developed by Microsoft in conjunction with Cambridge University. They developed a program which is able to create other programs, borrowing code. The invention is called DeepCoder. This software that can take into account the requirements of developers and find the code fragments in a large database. You can see the work of scientists here.
“The potential for the automation of writing software code is just incredible. This means a reduction of the huge amount of effort that is required to develop code. Such a system will be much more productive than any man. In addition, you can create a system that was previously impossible to build”,
says Armando Solar-Lezama at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Currently, the new program requires only the input and output data, that is, a set of values at the input of the program and other set of values at the output. Based on these data, the program can identify patterns. After the rules connecting the input and output data is found, DeepCoder will looks in other programs suitable pieces of code and they are ready to make your own program.
DeepCoder is able to search more widely and thoroughly than a programmer and collect pieces of code from different sources about which may not know the programmer. DeepCoder is able to cope with the creation of working programs in a fraction of a second, whereas in older systems it could take up to several minutes. It makes a multitude of combinations of lines of code before to make a working program. DeepCoder learns which combinations of source code are working and which are not, and in every new job improves the quality of their work.
Some developers say that in future the program will allow you to program even those people who don’t know any language. For this, they need only describe what result they want to obtain.
In January 2015, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of technology presented a program Prophet, which can find errors in the source code of other programs and fix them. The algorithm uses obtained from the Internet and automatically changed patches. According to the developers, unlike many other programs to fix your code, Prophet can work with the source code of the software, consisting of several hundred and of thousands and tens of thousands of rows. The program is able to choose the correct code from a variety of options and use the experience of previous fixes.
So, back to DeepCoder. Programmers do not need to worry now: at this moment DeepCoder can solve programming tasks, working with only five lines of codes. But machine learning methods are improving very quickly. To teach DeepCoder more difficult tasks it is only a matter of time
