Computers on verge of designing their own programs

Computer programmers may soon design the ultimate program: A program that designs programs.

Last week, a team led by Justin Gottschlich, director of the machine programming research group at Intel, announced the creation of a new machine learning system that designs its own code. They call the system MISIM, Machine Inferred Code Similarity.

Gottschlich explained, "Intel's ultimate goal for machine programming is to democratize the creation of software. When fully realized, machine programming will enable everyone to create software by expressing their intention in whatever fashion that's best for them, whether that's code, natural language or something else. That's an audacious goal, and while there's much more work to be done, MISIM is a solid step toward it."

The system analyzes a snippet of code and, because it can "understand" what the code is trying to accomplish, it seeks out code from its repository and searches for code designed for similar tasks. It can then offer suggestions for faster or more effective coding to achieve the same task.

John Carmack, the brilliant computer programmer responsible for such games as Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, and Quake, recently observed that despite so much progress in numerous areas of machine programming, the field of automatic computer-generated code had not always been a priority.