Recently, the world-famous programming competition website Codeforces published an article called "AlphaCode (DeepMind) Solves Programming Problems on CodeForce", which brought AlphaCode into people's vision and made DeepMind once again dominate the headlines of major media, which is also DeepMind's successful launch of Alpha Dog (AlphaGo) in 2015. After defeating the strongest Go player in humanity, we once again launched a re-list product that changed the world.
Following the development of the Go robot AlphaGo and the artificial intelligence predictive protein folding system AlphaFold, DeepMind, an AI company owned by Google, has announced the creation of a blockbuster programming robot system, AlphaCode, and the level of programming has reached the average level of human programmers.
DeepMind says AlphaCode's ability to write computer programs has reached a very competitive level. In a race against human programmers, AlphaCode can rank at a moderate level, ranking among the top 54 percent, marking an important step toward autonomous coding for humans.
According to DeepMind's official website, AlphaCod is an artificial intelligence tool invented by Google's AI department in the UNITED Kingdom, which can participate in major programming competitions like real programmers participating in the competition, and can also combine new problems with critical thinking, logic, algorithms, coding and natural language understanding to provide solutions. Before making its official debut, DeepMind had tested AlphaCode's true "level" in a programming competition.
Codeforces hosts algorithm competitions once or twice a week, and with a unique ladder ranking scoring system, AlphaCode silently participated in codeforces' last 10 programming competitions and achieved good results from more than half of human programmers, ranking in the top 54.3% with an Elo score of 1238.
Even Mikhail Mirzayanov, the founder of Codeforces, personally went down to play for AlphaCode, in addition to some polite remarks such as Codeforces far exceeding expectations, an important point of Mirzayanov is that AlphaCode seems to show a strong degree of creativity, which is very unusual.
This time DeepMind to AlphaCode to choose the programming site Codeforces is very necessary to introduce to you, and the current increasingly commercial Force Buckle (LeetCode), Codeforces' biggest feature is the openness of code and problem solving. Everyone can freely view the code of other big bulls, which is very in line with the tone of open source, and the Codeforces topic is generally not the kind of traditional science and class investigation project, often setting more thinking traps in the topic, and the data structure and classical algorithm are relatively less focused.
Oriole Vinyals, principal research scientist at DeepMind, said the study is still in its early stages, but preliminary results show the possibility of creating an autonomous system that solves the challenges of coding programs. "In this area, only humans can do it at the moment." Vinyals said, "In the long run, we are excited about AlphaCode's potential to help programmers and non-programmers write code, increase productivity, or create new ways to make software." ”
AlphaCode still can't beat the best human programmers at the moment. Critics also warn that machine-generated code must be examined with particular care for errors or unforeseen effects, including vulnerability to cyberattacks.
But DeepMind ultimately hopes that this AI tool can solve open-ended problems that require critical thinking, logic, and language understanding. Vinyals said that in the short term, AlphaCode can become an assistant to programmers, while in the long run the system will be able to write its own software.
Mike Mirzayanov, founder of Codeforces, a site that challenges AlphaCode, said in a joint statement with DeepMind: "I can say with certainty that AlphaCode's results exceeded my expectations and I think AlphaCode has reached the level of a promising new competitor. But implementing an algorithm is not the most difficult, inventing an algorithm is. ”
AlphaCode isn't the first AI tool to generate computer code, and many tech companies are developing similar applications. Last June, Microsoft and AI Labs OpenAI adapted language generators into automated programs capable of completing code strings. To end users, these systems are like Gmail's smart writing capabilities, doing whatever people are writing.
"While human programmers may still have an advantage today, it's only a matter of time before AI will surpass humans in many areas." Xiao Jianxiong, founder and chairman of autopilot company AutoX, said.
AI is considered the most effective tool to help humans understand the world around them, and it is also a must for tech giants. DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for $600 million, Microsoft funded OpenAI in $1 billion in 2019, and Meta also has a strong AI Research division that leads the world's most advanced AI research and development efforts.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, has said: "DeepMind's ultimate vision has always been to build universal AI to maximize the pace of scientific discovery and research. ”
Edited | Duan Lian Du Hengfeng Pan Haifu
Proofreading | Wang Yuelong
Daily economic news is synthesized from DeepMind's official website, CBN, public information, etc