Major Step in Search for AI-Based Programmer

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An artificial intelligence tool that can program software interests US military. The technology was developed by a team of computer scientists from Rice University with funding both from the US military and Google. BAYOU is a deep learning tool that basically works like a search engine for coding: tell it what sort of program you want to create with a couple of keywords, and it will spit out java code that will do what you’re looking for.

Basically, BAYOU read the source code for about 1500 Android apps, which comes out to 100 million lines of Java. All that code was fed through BAYOU’s neural net, resulting in AI that can program other software, according to futurism.com.

If the code that BAYOU read included any sort of information about what the code does, then BAYOU also learned what those programs were intended to do along with how they work. This contextual information is what lets the AI write functional software based on just a couple of keywords and basic information about what the programmer wants.

Right now, BAYOU is still in the early stages, and the team behind it is still proving their technology works. BAYOU merely generates what the researchers call “sketches” of a program that are relevant to what a programmer is trying to write. These sketches still need to be pieced together into the larger work.

But even if the technology is in its infancy, this is a major step in the search for an AI programmer, a longstanding goal for computer science researchers. Because BAYOU can get to work with just a couple of keywords, it’s much less time-intensive, and much easier to use overall, for the human operators.