Communications of the ACM
DeepMind Says its New AI Coding Engine is As Good As an Average Human Programmer
AlphaCode was tested on 10 of challenges that had been tackled by 5,000 users on the Codeforces site. On average, it ranked within the top 54.3% of responses.
Credit: Alex Castro/The Verge
DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says "writes computer programs at a competitive level." The Alphabet subsidiary tested its system against coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its program achieved an "estimated rank" placing it within the top 54 percent of human coders. The result is a significant step forward for autonomous coding, says DeepMind, though AlphaCode's skills are not necessarily representative of the sort of programming tasks faced by the average coder.
Oriol Vinyals, principal research scientist at DeepMind, told The Verge over email that the research was still in the early stages but that the results brought the company closer to creating a flexible problem-solving AI — a program that can autonomously tackle coding challenges that are currently the domain of humans only. "In the longer-term, we're excited by [AlphaCode's] potential for helping programmers and non-programmers write code, improving productivity or creating new ways of making software," said Vinyals.
AlphaCode could be used to create coding assistants, and one day write its own software
AlphaCode was tested against challenges curated by Codeforces, a competitive coding platform that shares weekly problems and issues rankings for coders similar to the Elo rating system used in chess. These challenges are different from the sort of tasks a coder might face while making, say, a commercial app. They're more self-contained and require a wider knowledge of both algorithms and theoretical concepts in computer science. Think of them as very specialized puzzles that combine logic, maths, and coding expertise.
From The Verge
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