The AI company DeepMind has previously solved problems from games to protein folding, and now it has built a tool that can create working code to solve complex software challenges
DeepMind, a UK-based AI company, has taught some of its machines to write computer software – and it performs almost as well as an average human programmer when judged in competition. DeepMind’s new AlphaCode is claimed to be able to solve software problems that require a combination of logic, critical thinking and the ability to understand natural language.
The tool was entered into 10 rounds on the programming competition website Codeforces, where human entrants test their coding skills. In these 10 rounds, AlphaCode placed at about the level of the median competitor. DeepMind says this is the first time an AI code-writing system has reached a competitive level of performance in programming contests. AlphaCode works by training a neural network on lots of coding samples, sourced from the software repository GitHub and previous entrants to competitions on Codeforces. When it is presented with a novel problem, it creates a massive number of solutions in both C++ and Python programming languages. It then filters and ranks these into a top 10. Finally, these were assessed by humans and the best were submitted into the competitions.Generating code is a particularly thorny problem for AI because it is difficult to assess how near to success a particular output is. Code that crashes and so fails to achieve its goal could be a single character away from a perfectly working solution, and multiple working solutions can appear radically different. Solving programming competitions also requires an AI to extract meaning from the description of a problem written in English.Microsoft-owned GitHub created a similar but more limited tool last year called Copilot. Millions of people use GitHub to share source code and organise software projects. Copilot took that code and trained a neural network with it, enabling it to solve similar programming problems. But the tool was controversial as many claimed it could directly plagiarise this training data. Armin Ronacher at software company Sentry found that it was possible to, complete with comments from the original programmer. This code cannot be reused without permission. At Copilot’s launch, GitHub said that about 0.1 per cent of its code suggestions may contain “some snippets” of verbatim source code from the training set. The company also warned that it is possible for Copilot to output genuine personal data such as phone numbers, email addresses or names, and that outputted code may offer “biased, discriminatory, abusive, or offensive outputs” or include security flaws. It says that code should be vetted and tested before use. AlphaCode, like Copilot, was first trained on publicly available code hosted on GitHub. It was then fine-tuned on code from programming competitions. DeepMind says that AlphaCode doesn’t copy code from previous examples. Given the examples DeepMind provided in its preprint paper, it does appear to solve problems while only copying slightly more code from training data than humans already do, saysBut AlphaCode seems to have been so finely tuned to solve complex challenges that the previous state of the art in AI coding tools can still outperform it on simpler tasks, she says. “What I noticed is that, while AlphaCode is able to do better than state-of-the-art like GPT on the competition challenges, it does comparatively poorly on the introductory challenges,” says Batista-Navarro. “The assumption is that they wanted to do competition-level programming problems, to tackle more challenging programming problems rather than introductory ones. But this seems to show that the model was fine-tuned so well on the more complicated problems that, in a way, it’s kind of forgotten the introductory level problems.” DeepMind wasn’t available for interview, but Oriol Vinyals at DeepMind said in a statement: “I never expected ML [machine learning] to achieve about human average amongst competitors. However, it indicates that there is still work to do to achieve the level of the highest performers, and advance the problem-solving capabilities of our AI systems.”
Trending
A gorgeous April afternoon in store across the Denver metro area 
‘Artemis Mission Cannot Lead To Interplanetary Wild West,’ Astronomer Warns 
Trump says US forces will ‘finish the job’ soon in first prime-time speech since starting Iran war 
Former Wisconsin football player, who left the sport amid mental health struggles, dead at 24 
Drew McIntyre Gives Honest Take About His Recent WWE Title Reign 
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduces bill that could keep the Padres in San Diego United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Crisis Text Line claims anonymized conversation data helps build AI for ‘a more empathetic world’Volunteer counselors weren’t aware of how the data is used.
Read more »
How AI is Transforming Hospitality Industry | HackerNoonHospitality AI is commanding higher customer loyalty with machine learning and NLP. Let's check out more about how AI is transforming the hospitality industry.
Read more »
Exploring Those Ethical AI Forebodings About Veritable Societal Imprisonment Via Modern Day Autonomous Mobilized Panopticons Courtesy Of AI-Based Self-Driving CarsEthical AI issues arise due to the advent of AI self-driving cars and the roving eye, akin to core precepts of the panopticon effect.
Read more »
Loris - Conversational AI for customer-first teamsConversational AI and insights to boost CX agent productivity and improve customer conversations - within weeks. Loris is integrated with Zendesk, LivePerson, Salesforce and Twilio.
Read more »
DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmerDeepMind teaches AI to code.
Read more »
What Does AI Teach Us About Human Intelligence?Research into artificial intelligence may redefine what we consider to be human intelligence. Here's why
Read more »