Rice University, deep in the BAYOU with software developed by AI

Turning deep-learning AI loose on software development: BAYOU learned to write code for programmers by studying billions of programs. – by Jade Boyd, Rice University posted on ScienceDaily, 25 April 2018.

Computer scientists have created a method to which developers can write keywords and a deep-learning, software-coding application can write the chunks of code in response.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded this initiative aimed at extracting knowledge from online source code repositories like GitHub. Bayou was presented in Vancouver, this week, at the Sixth International Conference on Learning Representations.

“People have tried for 60 years to build systems that can write code, but the problem is that these methods aren’t that good with ambiguity,” said Bayou co-creator Swarat Chaudhuri, associate professor of computer science at Rice. – by Jade Boyd, Rice University posted on ScienceDaily, 25 April 2018.

Chaudhuri said Bayou basically studied everything on GitHub by training itself by studying millions of lines of human-written Java code. BAYOU read the source code for over a thousand Android apps, then the code resulted in AI that can program other software.

 

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. Other attempts to create something like BAYOU required extensive, narrow constraints to guide programmers towards the correct type of code. 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. – The Military Just Created An AI That Learned How To Program Software, by Dan Robitzski, Futurism.com, April 26, 2018

The AI studies all the code posted on GitHub and uses that to write its own code. Using a process called neural sketch learning, the AI reads all the code and then associates an “intent” behind each. Now when a human asks Bayou to create an app, Bayou associates the intent its learned from codes on Github to the user’s request and begins writing the app it thinks the user wants. – An AI can now write its own code, by Michael Grothaus, Fast Company, April 27, 2018

 

Bayou is available under a permissive open-source license. BAYOU is still in the early stages, and the team behind it is still proving their technology works.