What's New in Deep Learning Research: Teaching Computers How to Code

Writing programs that can create programs have been an elusive goal of artificial intelligence(AI) research for many years. As a matter of fact, the idea that AI agents can create their own programs if often seem as one of the differentiators of general AI vs. narrow AI. So important is this goal, that AI researchers have created a specific area of research known as Program Synthesis that focuses on addressing those challenges. The idea behind program synthesis is to create AI agents that can generate programs that match a given specification. We often use primitive versions of this technique when we take advantage of, for instance, the Flash Fill feature in Microsoft Excel.