How AI based programming could work
The author proposes a lot of vague ideas in this article (for example &quot;I believe one of the biggest problems is the use of Error Propagation and Gradient Descent&quot;) without references or any solid proofs why they are necessary to solve the proposed program (Automate programming using ML?).<p>In fact there is already a lot of solid work just on this subject:<p>* Learning algorithms from examples
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1511.07275" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1511.07275</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1410.5401" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1410.5401</a><p>* Generating source code from natural language description
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1510.07211" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1510.07211</a><p>* And, the most closest work to what author probably wants, a way to write a program in forth while leaving some functions as neural blackboxes to be learned from examples:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1605.06640" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1605.06640</a><p>* Also there is a whole research program by nothing less than Facebook AI Research that explicitly aims at creating a conversational AI agent that is able to translate user&#x27;s natural language orders into programs (asking to the user additional questions if necessary): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1511.08130" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;1511.08130</a> (there is also a summary here <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;colinraffel.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;a_roadmap_towards_machine_intelligence" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;colinraffel.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;a_roadmap_towards_machine_intell...</a> )<p>And deepmind is also working on conversational agents: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vQXAsdMa_8A?t=1265" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;vQXAsdMa_8A?t=1265</a><p>Given current success of such models, automating simple programming tasks maybe not as much research as engineering and scaling up problem.<p>There is a lot of exciting machine learning research out there nowadays. Almost all of this research is available for free from papers posted on arxiv. It is a really good idea to read more about state of the art before coming with new ideas.