Hacker News Reader

Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

this is cool. i suppose it's only a matter of time until we see optimizing compilers that use transformer-rl style searches for subsets of their optimization and codegen.

View on HN

Generating pgo data with graph ML is already a thing

i'm guessing most of that stuff is register allocation and cache management.

rl-searches could potentially rewrite entire algorithms.

edit: (more musing) maybe the future of software engineering will be authoring bullet proof acceptance tests.

Nevermind compilers, the possibility of updating architectures & code bases by automation. A true feasible attack on tech debt and legacy code.

Will also generate some fun bugs!

Unless it provides or simply works within formal verification?

Formal verification does not prove lack of bugs. In best case, can only catch one certain type of bugs.

https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/62855

Formal verification is very good at proving that compiler transformations preserve semantics. Programming language semantics are pretty well specified (at least for some programming languages...), so the chance of bugs in the specification are low.

It can catch all kinds of bugs, but you have to ask the correct questions. So it comes down to define what a bug is and the assumptions you use for testing. And therein lies the problem: what constitutes a bug? A function that add two numbers but bever terminates might be considered bugfree if forget to include as a bug that not giving an answer before the end of the universe is faulty behaviour. We humans are terrible at writing these kind of specifications, so formal verification as a method just pushes the correctness from code to specification.

If you navigate within algebraic structures with well known properties (which are also verified for example), formal verification is all you need, you can be certain of being bug free.

Relax - we'll soon have self-learning debuggers, too.

Whenever I see stuff about automated algorithms it reminds me of a movie, can't remember the name or plot exactly but they create a being or upload someones consciousness and the "ai" is solving all the problems the world faces until it reaches the last one, humans. It then begins to synthesize some airborne virus or nukes that would scour us from the earth. We basically created tech that would eventually optimize us out of existence as a cancer to the earth.

Edit, found it Transcendence (2014), also it seems my brain injected some random thoughts into that plot, it's not about that at all but the point stands!

Must have been an embarrassing incident for the engineer that commented out the "Don't kill humans" constraint for a quick debug session.

Transendence is one of the few movies that present an almighty AI that's benevolent in nature.

You might watch "I am mother". Greater good was always an interesting concept.

Superoptimizers are already extremely good at discovering latent flaws in high level source code, and in compilers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com