Computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Intel, and MIT have created software that could ultimately enable computers to write their own programs.
Initially, though, its purpose is to save human computer programmers frustrating hours, or sometimes days, of work finding and fixing bugs among thousands or millions of lines of code in software programs.
The new software – called Machine Inferred Code Similarity (MISIM) – works in a similar way to natural language programming, which allows a computer to understand instructions written in words instead of symbols.
MISIM can look at a line of computer code and understand what it’s telling a computer to do. It then can search through millions of other computer programs to find code telling a computer to do the same thing.
By comparing a draft of a new computer program with software with a similar intent and known to be working correctly, MISIM can flag lines of code that might contain errors. It also can suggest corrections or changes to the code to streamline or otherwise improve it.
Ultimately, MISIM could receive a written message from a person that describes something the person wants a computer to do. MISIM then would comb through other programs, piece together, and sequence lines of code from other sources that would achieve the outcome.
TRENDPOST: MISIM is another step along the path of artificial intelligence that eventually will enable computers to become autonomous – not only writing their own programs, but also designing their next generations of hardware without human input.
by Bennett Daviss
