DeepMind Says its New AI Coding Engine is as Good as an Average Human Programmer
upstart writes:
DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer:
DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says writes computer programs at a competitive level." The Alphabet subsidiary tested its system against coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its program achieved an estimated rank" placing it within the top 54 percent of human coders.
[...] Ten of these challenges were fed into AlphaCode in exactly the same format they're given to humans. AlphaCode then generated a larger number of possible answers and winnowed these down by running the code and checking the output just as a human competitor might. The whole process is automatic, without human selection of the best samples," Yujia Li and David Choi, co-leads of the AlphaCode paper, told The Verge over email.
AlphaCode was tested on 10 of challenges that had been tackled by 5,000 users on the Codeforces site. On average, it ranked within the top 54.3 percent of responses, and DeepMind estimates that this gives the system a Codeforces Elo of 1238, which places it within the top 28 percent of users who have competed on the site in the last six months.
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