DeepMind Builds AI That Codes as Well as the Average Human Programmer - ExtremeTech

While machine learning has advanced by leaps and bounds, it's hard to create an AI that's good at more than one thing. So, a machine could be trained with data to handle one class of programming challenges, but it would fail when given a different problem to tackle. So, the team decided to skip all the training on algorithms and code structure, instead treating it more like a translation problem. Programming challenges usually include a description of the task, and the resulting code submitted by a human participant is technically just an expression of the description. The AI works in two phases: It takes the description and converts it to an internal representation.