Intel Labs has big plans for a software tool called ControlFlag that uses artificial intelligence to scan through code and pick out errors. One of those goals, perhaps way out in the future, is to bake it into chip packages as a last line of defense against faulty code. This could make the information flow on communications channels safer and efficient. Last week Intel open-sourced the tool – dubbed ControlFlag – to software developers. The software pores over lines of code and points out errors that developers can then fix.

Let the OSS Enterprise newsletter guide your open source journey! 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. "Last year, ControlFlag identified a code anomaly in Client URL (cURL), a computer software project transferring data using various network protocols over one billion times a day," Intel principal AI scientist Justin Gottschlich wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn. "Most recently, ControlFlag achieved state-of-the-art results by identifying hundreds of latent defects related to memory and potential system crash bugs in proprietary production-level software. In addition, ControlFlag found dozens of novel anomalies on several high-quality open-source software repositories."

Machine programming, which automates the development and maintenance of software, is becoming supercharged by AI. During its Build developer conference in May, Microsoft detailed a new feature in Power Apps that taps OpenAI's GPT-3 language model to assist people in choosing formulas. Intel's ControlFlag can autonomously detect errors in code. And Facebook's TransCoder converts code from one programming language into another. The applications of computer programming are vast in scope.

For the vast majority of humans, writing code is akin to learning a new language – but researchers from Intel and MIT are on a mission to change that. And the solution they are coming up with is to build code… that can code. Called machine programming, the field that the researchers are looking at is concerned with automating software development. And the team has just revealed a new tool that takes developers one step closer to the prospect of, one day, having machines that can program themselves. MISIM (Machine Inferred code Similarity), the new technology invented by Intel and MIT's labs, effectively studies snippets of code to understand what a piece of software intends to do.

Computer programmers may soon design the ultimate program: A program that designs programs. Last week, a team led by Justin Gottschlich, director of the machine programming research group at Intel, announced the creation of a new machine learning system that designs its own code. They call the system MISIM, Machine Inferred Code Similarity. Gottschlich explained, "Intel's ultimate goal for machine programming is to democratize the creation of software. When fully realized, machine programming will enable everyone to create software by expressing their intention in whatever fashion that's best for them, whether that's code, natural language or something else. That's an audacious goal, and while there's much more work to be done, MISIM is a solid step toward it."

What's New: Today, Intel unveiled a new machine programming (MP) system – in conjunction with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). The system, machine inferred code similarity (MISIM), is an automated engine designed to learn what a piece of software intends to do by studying the structure of the code and analyzing syntactic differences of other code with similar behavior. "Intel's ultimate goal for machine programming is to democratize the creation of software. When fully realized, MP will enable everyone to create software by expressing their intention in whatever fashion that's best for them, whether that's code, natural language or something else. That's an audacious goal, and while there's much more work to be done, MISIM is a solid step toward it."

When OpenAI first published a paper on their new language generation AI, GPT-3, the hype was slow to build. The paper indicated GPT-3, the biggest natural language AI model yet, was advanced, but it only had a few written examples of its output. Then OpenAI gave select access to a beta version of GPT-3 to see what developers would do with it, and minds were blown. Developers playing with GPT-3 have taken to Twitter with examples of its capabilities: short stories, press releases, articles about itself, a search engine. Perhaps most surprising was the discovery GPT-3 can write simple computer code. When web developer, Sharif Shameem, modified it to spit out HTML instead of natural language, the program generated code for webpage layouts from prompts like "a button that looks like a watermelon."

That's why some people think we should just get machines to program themselves. Automated code generation has been a hot research topic for a number of years. Microsoft is building basic code generation into its widely used software development tools, Facebook has made a system called Aroma that autocompletes small programs, and DeepMind has developed a neural network that can come up with more efficient versions of simple algorithms than those devised by humans. Even OpenAI's GPT-3 language model can churn out simple pieces of code, such as web page layouts, from natural-language prompts. Gottschlich and his colleagues call this machine programming.