Google develops AI capable of Creative Programming
The AlphaCode system, developed by Google, uses artificial intelligence to program ‘software’.
The dream (or nightmare) of machines programming by themselves is one step closer to becoming a reality. DeepMind, the leading company for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems acquired by Google in 2014, presented AlphaCode, a tool capable of writing code at a competitive level. The merit of the program is to have achieved a level of efficiency and creativity in problem solving comparable to the average human programmer, something never achieved before.
It is not the first system capable of programming: Microsoft’s Copilot already demonstrated last year that it could program reliably. However, this system was accused of taking advantage of parts of code available on GitHub, the open source repository with which it was trained. In programming it is a common practice to take advantage of parts of code already developed for new projects, a kind of cut and paste with which to save time and resources to focus on adding new features. Still, Microsoft’s system was accused of excessively plagiarizing those code snippets it fed on.
AlphaCode’s way of operating, according to its managers, is more creative. It also copies code from others, but at levels similar to that of any programmer. The system is based on the so-called deep neural networks, the most applied model in the advancement of machine learning or deep learning. This branch of artificial intelligence puts several layers of AI systems to work at the same time and connects them with each other, trying to mimic as much as possible the functioning of the neurons of the human brain. In this case, AlphaCode was trained with loads of code examples also pulled from GitHub and the Codeforces hacker competition. When presented with a complex problem, the DeepMind system comes up with a massive number of different solutions and then selects the top ten.
AlphaCode developers decided to test their system in a competition with programmers and engineers, in which a series of problems are presented and then the answers provided by the participants are scored. The results were very good: it was tested in ten rounds and they realized that the program obtained a score that was in the average of that obtained by humans. He was among the 54% of those who did the best of the 5,000 participants. “It is the first time that a computer system achieves such a competitive level in a competition for elite programmers,” they underline from DeepMind.
That DeepMind’s system performed well on that challenge speaks volumes about AlphaCode’s capabilities. “The problems he faced were not seen before by the model during his training. Creatively solving these challenges requires a combination of critical thinking, logic, algorithms, programming, and understanding of natural language.
“I never imagined that machine learning would achieve a system similar to that of human competitors,” says the Spaniard Oriol Vinyals, principal investigator of DeepMind, director of deep learning research at the London company and head of the AlphaCode program. “This is just the beginning!
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