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Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
81–90 of 415 posts
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#82Between 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…
My bet would be that it will never happen in a reasonable time frame. And also by that logic, writing that "documentation/spec" would just mean learning a new programming language the AI engine can parse making it as useful as a compiler. Anyone who has been writing and designing software for a while knows the cycle is way more complex than take some input and write code. Let me know when the AI engine is able to do…
I hear that.
Machine Learning also has a long way to go before it can take a long, rambling mess of a meeting and somehow generate a halfway usable spec from it. I mean, the customer says they want X, but X is silly in this context, so we'll give them Y and tell them it's "X-like, but faster". For example, SQL is "Blockchain-like, but faster" for a lot of buzzword use-cases of blockchain.
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#83This 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…
> but it could make developers 50x productive
More likely it will translate the abstraction level by some vector of 50 elements.
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#84Between 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…
Model-driven development and code generation from UML were once supposed to be the future. It will be interesting to see how much further this approach takes us.
Assuming ANNs resemble the way human brain function you'd also expect them to introduce bugs. And so the actual humans beings would partake in debugging too.
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#85The 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…
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Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paying it forward, it will help others in turn.
Yes it will help the already powerful players disproportionately.
The problem is not really that microsoft owns github, or that licenses allow corporations free use, but that the tech giants are so big and have so much power.
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#87Do I understand it correctly that it generated (in the end) ten solutions that then were examined by humans and one picked? Still absolutely amazing though.
No human examination was done. But it generated 10 solutions which it ran against the example inputs, and picked the one that passed. Actually I'm not sure if it ran the solutions against the example inputs or the real inputs.
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Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#88I'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 that pit AI against itself to improve runtime or memory performance. Programmers can spend more time thinking about what they want the final product to do, rather than getting mired in mundane details, and be guaranteed that portions of software will perform extremely well.
Is this a naive fantasy on my part, or actually possible?
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#89Does this mean that we can all stop grinding leetcode now?
Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode
#90Calling 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 several new career paths made possible by this technology as greater worker productivity makes possible greater specialization.