Neural programmer better than Quicksort
It's really hard to write correct code.<p>Sorting was broken in java and nobody noticed for a long time: <a href="http://envisage-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sorting.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://envisage-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sortin...</a><p>The same was true for java's binary search:
<a href="https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html" rel="nofollow">https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about...</a><p>So I am not sure I will ever trust an ML algorithm trained on inputs/outputs only (which is what I think "neural program induction" means). The above bugs are only hit because the programmers who wrote it didn't think about overflow. What is this "neural programmer" assuming about their inputs? We'll never know.<p>OTOH the standard library sort can be improved if you know the distribution of the numbers you're sorting (e.g., small numbers can bucket sort, small lists can use a sorting network, etc). If this thing can efficiently almost-correctly-sort because it's better at these types of pattern matching, we can just run a final pass of insertion sort to make it useful!