Computer programmers might have a lot less work to do thanks to a new computing system called DeepCoder. The system can write its own code, or instructions that allow a computer to complete a task—no humans required.
DeepCoder was developed by scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge, both located in England. It’s a form of artificial intelligence—a computer system that can perform tasks that normally require skills associated with human intelligence, like decision making.
The developers presented DeepCoder with simple problems taken from programming competitions for human programmers. The software chose commands from a list selected by the researchers and combined them to build a program to solve each problem.
Currently, DeepCoder can write only simple programs to solve problems presented to it in certain formats. Scientists hope systems like it will someday be able to understand requests written or spoken in plain English, or figure out a task after seeing a pattern. “For example, if you start renaming files in a certain pattern, the system could build a program and finish the task for you,” says Marc Brockschmidt, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research and one of DeepCoder’s creators.