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Interesting, I never thought about that. It seems like something very far off, though. Does anyone know about any research currently being done in this field?

• gaius 10y ago
  Heh, it's the oldest thing there is in the field, almost. FORTRAN and COBOL were invented in the 1950s so that scientists and business managers could write their own programs without having to employ those expensive "programmers" who could write machine code. Now it's 60+ years later, and there are still human programmers.
• mike_hearn 10y ago
  That's what (supervised) machine learning and neural networks do, isn't it. You specify the "what" and not the "how", they figure out the "how". Basically techniques for automating the task of computer programming given requirements. So any advance in AI/ML/NNs can be seen as advances in the field of automating computer programmers. We don't tend to think of it like that because these techniques have to be applied, currently, by computer programmers, and the software the techniques "write" was generally infeasible to write by hand anyway: it's been so far purely additive and solving problems that hand-written software either couldn't do at all or where it sucked and progress was very slow. But watch out. The tech is getting better scarily fast. Neural networks have been able to learn how to do basic algorithms like sorting given only examples. The primary limit is still the amount of data they need to work with, but R&D is driving that down too. I can see a time when many tasks that today automatically require skilled programmers are instead done by domain experts who simply shovel data into an advanced neural network and discover it gets results that are good enough. Perhaps hand-written software made by a skilled programmer would be better, but the machine is a lot cheaper ... http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/7923-neural-turing-machines-learn-their-algorithms.html http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligenc...