Microsoft's AI is Learning to Write Code by Itself, Not Steal It

What if instead of searching through menus within programs like Microsoft Excel, our computers could understand the problem we're trying to solve and write the software to solve it? It's a hyper-futuristic idea, but one that has recently seen progress from Microsoft Research and the University of Cambridge. In a November 2016 paper, which gained notoriety after being accepted into one of the year's largest artificial intelligence conferences, Microsoft and Cambridge built an algorithm capable of writing code that would solve simple math problems. The algorithm, named DeepCoder, would be able to augment its own ability by also looking at potential combinations of code for how a problem could be solved. However, this doesn't mean it steals code, or copy and pastes it from existing software, or searches the internet for solutions, as some reports have claimed. "We're targeting the people who can't or don't want to code, but can specify what their problem is," says Marc Brockschmidt of Microsoft Research, a co-author of the paper, likening the work to Excel formulas that could take simple commands to solve for answers without being given the mathematical equation.