Computers are getting better at writing their own code but software engineers may not need to worry about losing their jobs just yet.

DeepMind, a U.K. artificial intelligence lab acquired by Google in 2014, announced Wednesday that it has created a piece of software called AlphaCode that can code just as well as an average human programmer.

They have released their dataset of competitive programming problems and solutions on GitHub, including extensive tests to ensure the programs that pass these tests are correct — a critical feature current datasets lack. They hope that this benchmark will lead to further innovations in problem solving and code generation.

The problem is from Codeforces, and the solution was generated by AlphaCode.

The researchers evaluated their model using many programs for each challenge. Further, they filtered, clustered, and reranked the resulting solutions down to a small group of 10 candidate programs for external evaluation. They collaborated with Codeforces and tested AlphaCode by replicating participation in ten recent contests. This automated system replaces rivals’ trial-and-error debugging, compilation, testing, and submission processes.

I can safely say the results of AlphaCode exceeded my expectations. I was sceptical because even in simple competitive problems it is often required not only to implement the algorithm, but also (and this is the most difficult part) to invent it. AlphaCode managed to perform at the level of a promising new competitor. I can't wait to see what lies ahead!

Mike Mirzayanov, Founder of Codeforces

Solving competitive programming problems is a really hard thing to do, requiring both good coding skills and problem solving creativity in humans. I was very impressed that AlphaCode could make progress in this area, and excited to see how the model uses its statement understanding to produce code and guide its random exploration to create solutions.”

Petr Mitrichev, Software Engineer - Google & Competitive Programmer

In 1997 Garry Kasparov played against (and lost) the supercomputer DeepBlue. Perhaps we will be witnessing a confrontation between tourist (Gennady Korotkevich) and AI in near future. What do you think?

You can read more at Competitive programming with AlphaCode

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