Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

deepmind.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 415 posts

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#51

Post by chroem- »

wittycardio wrote: post #6
hmate9 wrote: post #2

Between this and OpenAI's Github Copilot "programming" will slowly start dying probably. What I mean by that is that sure, you have to learn how to program, but our time will be spent much more on just the design part and writing detailed documentation/specs and then we just have one of these AIs generate the code. It's the next step. Binary code Historically its always been about abstracting and writing less code to…

Solving competitive programming problems is essentially solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. Throwing a massive amount of compute and gradient descent at the problem has always been possible. If I'm not mistaken what this does is reduce the representation of the problem to a state where it can run gradient descent and then tune parameters. The real magic is in finding structurally new approaches. If anyt…

> Solving competitive programming problems is essentially solving hard combinatorial optimization problems.

True, but if you relax your hard requirements of optimality to admit "good enough" solutions, you can use heuristic approaches that are much more tractable. High quality heuristic solutions to NP-hard problems, enabled by ML, are going to be a big topic over the next decade, I think.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#52

Post by blt »

I am always surprised by the amount of skepticism towards deep learning on HN. When I joined the field around 10 years ago, image classification was considered a grand challenge problem (e.g. https://xkcd.com/1425/). 5 years ago, only singularity enthusiast types were envisioning things like GPT-3 and Copilot in the short term.

I think many people are uncomfortable with the idea that their own "intelligent" behavior is not that different from pattern recognition.

I do not enjoy running deep learning experiments. Doing resource-hungry empirical work is not why I got into CS. But I still believe it is very powerful.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#53

Post by dskloet »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #36
dskloet wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really no need for an 11 in the code. I'd say that makes the code worse, not better.

This is a toy problem to illustrate that CoPilot cannot write code that requires mathematical reasoning. It regurgitates solutions from the training set, via a mixed internal reresentation.

What requires mathematical reasoning? Getting or setting the nth bit? Or swapping two variables? What am I missing?

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#54

Post by agentultra »

This is kind of neat. I wonder if it will one day be possible for it to find programs that maintain invariant properties we state in proofs. This would allow us to feel confident that even though it's generating huge programs that do weird things a human might not think of... well that it's still correct for the stated properties we care about, ie: that it's not doing anything underhanded.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#55

Post by hackinthebochs »

paxys wrote: post #33
hackinthebochs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "problem" is that as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work. Unless the complexity of the work scales as well. I've always felt that programmers would be the first class of knowledge workers to be put out of work by automation. This may be the beginning of the end for the programming gravy train.

> as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work Yes, but the total amount of work (and surrounding complexity) also increases with it. Just look at the evolution of the software industry over the last few decades.

History isn't a great guide here. Historically the abstractions that increased efficiency begat further complexity. Coding in Python elides over low-level issues but the complexity of how to arrange the primitives of python remains for the programmer to engage with. AI coding has the potential to elide over all the complexity that we identify as programming. I strongly suspect this time is different.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#56

Post by thomasahle »

jxcole wrote: post #41
msoad wrote: post #19

This seems to have a narrower scope than GitHub Copilot. It generates more lines of code to a more holistic problem vs. GitHub Copilot that works as a "more advanced autocomplete" in code editors. Sure Copilot can synthesize full functions and classes but for me, it's the most useful when it suggests another test case's title or writes repetitive code like this.foo = foo; this.bar = bar etc... Having used Copilot I c…

I feel like you are very defensive here and I want to be sure we take time to recognize this as a real accomplishment. Seriously though, I do doubt I can be fully replaced by a robot any time soon, it may be the case that soon enough I can make high-level written descriptions of programs and hand them off to an AI to do most of the work. This wouldn't completely replace me, but it could make developers 50x productive…

If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#57

Post by thomasahle »

prideout wrote: post #46

It is obvious to me that computer programming is an interesting AI goal, but at the same time I wonder if I'm biased, because I'm a programmer. The authors of AlphaCode might be biased in this same way. I guess this makes sense though, from a practical point of view. Verifying correctness would be difficult in other intellectual disciplines like physics and higher mathematics.

Just make it output a proof together with the program.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#58

Post by alphabetting »

pretendscholar wrote: post #50
visarga wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying it forward, it will help others in turn.

Yes it will help the already powerful players disproportionately.

They opensourced alphafold for anyone to use commercially despite big financial incentive to keep it private and use in their new drug discovery lab. No idea how this works or differs from alphafold but imagine they'll do the same here if possible

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#59

Post by hackinthebochs »

visarga wrote: post #35
hackinthebochs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "problem" is that as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work. Unless the complexity of the work scales as well. I've always felt that programmers would be the first class of knowledge workers to be put out of work by automation. This may be the beginning of the end for the programming gravy train.

> The "problem" is that as you move up the levels of abstraction, you need fewer people to do the same amount of work. This will lower the entry barrier to developing software so more people will go into the field. Before you needed to know a programming language, now you will just have a dialogue with a language model. > I've always felt that programmers would be the first class of knowledge workers to be put out of…

>This will lower the entry barrier to developing software so more people will go into the field.

Indeed. The ideal future of programming is something out of star trek. I often noticed how everyone on the ship is a programmer of a sort, they whip up a simulation as the problem warrants regardless of their field. But in this future, the job of programmer basically doesn't exist. As a programmer, I should be allowed to have mixed feelings about that.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#60

Post by UncleMeat »

quenix wrote: post #7
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #5

The example problem (essentially, is T a subsequence of S with deletions of size N) is a classic problem with no doubt dozens of implementations in AlphaCode's training set. And yet, what a garbage solution it produces. To illustrate the difference between intelligence and regurgitation, someone tell me what CoPilot generates for this: // A Go function to swap the sixth bit and seventeenth bit of a 32-bit signed inte…

Here is what CoPilot wrote in Python: # A function to swap the sixth bit and seventeenth bit of a 32-bit signed integer. def swap_bits(x): # Get the value of the sixth bit. bit6 = x & (1 > 5 bit17 = bit17 >> 16 # Combine the swapped values of the sixth and seventeenth bit. x = x ^ (bit6 It actually synthesised about 10 viable solutions. Some interesting ones: def swap_six_seventeen(x): # Get the binary representation…

The xors are wrong. Stick in the integer 1<<16.
Post reply on HN