Intel today open-sourced ControlFlag, a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code — ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. In tests, the company’s machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, “production-quality” software, demonstrating its usefulness.
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ControlFlag, which works with any programming language containing control structures (i.e., blocks of code that specify the flow of control in a program), aims to cut down on debugging work by leveraging unsupervised learning. With unsupervised learning, an algorithm is subjected to “unknown” data for which no previously defined categories or labels exist. The machine learning system — ControlFlag, in this case — must teach itself to classify the data, processing the unlabeled data to learn from its inherent structure.
ControlFlag continually learns from unlabeled source code, “evolving” to make itself better as new data is introduced. While it can’t yet automatically mitigate the programming defects it finds, the tool provides suggestions for potential corrections to developers, according to Gottschlich.
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AI-powered coding tools like ControlFlag, as well as platforms like Tabnine, Ponicode, Snyk, and DeepCode, have the potential to reduce costly interactions between developers, such as Q&A sessions and repetitive code review feedback. IBM and OpenAI are among the many companies investigating the potential of machine learning in the software development space. But studies have shown that AI has a ways to go before it can replace many of the manual tasks that human programmers perform on a regular basis.
Source: Intel open-sources AI-powered tool to spot bugs in code | VentureBeat
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