Google-owned DeepMind's AlphaCode one step closer to autonomous coding

(Image Courtesy: DeepMind/Google)

Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind has created a new coding engine called AlphaCode, that it says is as competent as an average programmer.

The company tested AlphaCode by putting it through coding challenges used in competitions, and the engine placed among the top 54 percent of coders.

DeepMind agrees the engine's skills don't represent tasks faced by an average programmer but it is still a huge step towards autonomous coding.

In an email exchange with The Verge, Oriol Vinyals, research scientist at DeepMind said that AlphaCode was one step closer to becoming a problem-solving Artificial Intelligence.

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“In the longer-term, we’re excited by [AlphaCode’s] potential for helping programmers and non-programmers write code, improving productivity or creating new ways of making software,” said Vinyals.

AlphaCode faced ten challenges, organised and curated by Codeforces, a coding platform that shares challenges and issues ranking for top coders. These run the gamut from normal tasks a coder might face to more complex ones that require advanced knowledge.

These challenges were fed into the system using the same parameters that human competitors abide by, and the engine then generated a large set of answers before whittling them down by testing to see what worked.

The challenges had previously been tackled by 5,000 users on the Codeforces website and when compared, AlphaCode ranked within the top 54.3 percent of responses.

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“I was sceptical because even in simple competitive problems it is often required not only to implement the algorithm, but also to invent it," said Codeforces founder Mike Mirzayanov in a statement shared with DeepMind.

"AlphaCode managed to perform at the level of a promising new competitor,” he added.