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Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

deepmind.com

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Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#101

Post by udev »

qualudeheart wrote: post #90

Calling it now: If current language models can solve competitive programming at an average human level, we’re only a decade or less off from competitive programming being as solved as Go or Chess. Deepmind or openAI will do it. If not them, it will be a Chinese research group on par with them. I’ll be considering a new career. It will still be in computer science but it won’t be writing a lot of code. There’ll be sev…

Yes, for very precise, comprehensive text descriptions of problems.

It will take a far-far more advanced AI to write such descriptions for real-world problems.

Writing requirements for a project is difficult work, and not for technical reasons, but for human reasons (people don't know what they want exactly, people have trouble imagining things they haven't seen yet, people are irrational, people might want something that is different from what they need, etc.)

In this regard, we are safe for a few more decades at least.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#102

Post by steve76 »

qualudeheart wrote: post #90

Calling it now: If current language models can solve competitive programming at an average human level, we’re only a decade or less off from competitive programming being as solved as Go or Chess. Deepmind or openAI will do it. If not them, it will be a Chinese research group on par with them. I’ll be considering a new career. It will still be in computer science but it won’t be writing a lot of code. There’ll be sev…

No post body was provided.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#103

Post by FemmeAndroid »

This is extremely impressive, but I do think it’s worth noting that these two things were provided:

- a very well defined problem. (One of the things I like about competitive programming and the like is just getting to implement a clearly articulated problem, not something I experience on most days.) - existing test data.

This is definitely a great accomplishment, but I think those two features of competitive programming are notably different than my experience of daily programming. I don’t mean to suggest these will always be limitations of this kind of technology, though.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#105

Post by andy_ppp »

udev wrote: post #101
qualudeheart wrote: post #90

Calling it now: If current language models can solve competitive programming at an average human level, we’re only a decade or less off from competitive programming being as solved as Go or Chess. Deepmind or openAI will do it. If not them, it will be a Chinese research group on par with them. I’ll be considering a new career. It will still be in computer science but it won’t be writing a lot of code. There’ll be sev…

Yes, for very precise, comprehensive text descriptions of problems. It will take a far-far more advanced AI to write such descriptions for real-world problems. Writing requirements for a project is difficult work, and not for technical reasons, but for human reasons (people don't know what they want exactly, people have trouble imagining things they haven't seen yet, people are irrational, people might want something…

I would actually argue the programmers job has never been 100% writing the code, it’s always been interpreting, fixing and decoding the ideas of others.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#106

Post by shihab »

gfd wrote: post #13

Relevant blogpost on codeforces.com (the competitive programming site used): https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/99566 Apparently the bot would have a rating of 1300. Although the elo rating between sites is not comparable, for some perspective, mark zuckerberg had a rating of ~1k when he was in college on topcoder: https://www.topcoder.com/members/mzuckerberg

For comparison, I used to be a very average, but pretty regular user about 5 years ago. I could reliably solve easiest 2 out of 5 problems, 3 in my lucky days.

My rating is 1562.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#107

Post by qualudeheart »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #99
qualudeheart wrote: post #90

Calling it now: If current language models can solve competitive programming at an average human level, we’re only a decade or less off from competitive programming being as solved as Go or Chess. Deepmind or openAI will do it. If not them, it will be a Chinese research group on par with them. I’ll be considering a new career. It will still be in computer science but it won’t be writing a lot of code. There’ll be sev…

I'm already anticipating having the job title of "Query Engineer" sometime in the next 30 years, and I do NLP including large scale language model training. :(

One of the big venture capitalists predicted “prompt engineering” as a future high paid and high status position.

Essentially handling large language models.

Early prompt engineers will probably be drawn from “data science” communities and will be similarly high status, well but not as well paid, and require less mathematical knowledge.

I’m personally expecting an “Alignment Engineer” role monitoring AI systems for unwanted behavior.

This will be structurally similar to current cyber security roles but mostly recruited from Machine Learning communities, and embedded in a broader ML ecosystem.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#108

Post by phreeza »

mirrorlake wrote: post #88

I've been wondering this for a while: In the future, code-writing AI could be tasked with generating the most reliable and/or optimized code to pass your unit tests. Human programmers will decide what we want the software to do, make sure that we find all the edge cases and define as many unit tests as possible, and let the AI write significant portions of the product. Not only that, but you could include benchmarks…

And a second AI to generate additional test cases similar to yours (which you accept as also in scope) to avoid the first AI gaming the test.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#109

Post by jakub_g »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #103

This is extremely impressive, but I do think it’s worth noting that these two things were provided: - a very well defined problem. (One of the things I like about competitive programming and the like is just getting to implement a clearly articulated problem, not something I experience on most days.) - existing test data. This is definitely a great accomplishment, but I think those two features of competitive program…

100% agree. Someone (who?) had to take time and write the detailed requirements. In real jobs you rarely get good tickets with well defined expectations; it's one of most important developer's jobs to transform fuzzy requirement into a good ticket.

(Side note: I find that many people skip this step, and go straight from fuzzy-requirement-only-discussed-on-zoom-with-Bob to code; open a pull request without much context or comments; and then a code reviewer is supposed to review it properly without really knowing what problem is actually being solved, and whether the code is solving a proper problem at all).

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#110

Post by phendrenad2 »

qualudeheart wrote: post #90

Calling it now: If current language models can solve competitive programming at an average human level, we’re only a decade or less off from competitive programming being as solved as Go or Chess. Deepmind or openAI will do it. If not them, it will be a Chinese research group on par with them. I’ll be considering a new career. It will still be in computer science but it won’t be writing a lot of code. There’ll be sev…

Calling it now: Your prediction is off by an order of magnitude or two (10 years -> 100 years, or 1000 years)
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