Recognizing correct code
MIT researchers have developed a machine-learning system that can comb through repairs to open-source computer programs and learn their general properties, in order to produce new repairs for a different set of programs. The researchers tested their system on a set of programming errors, culled from real open-source applications, that had been compiled to evaluate automatic bug-repair systems. Where those earlier systems were able to repair one or two of the bugs, the MIT system repaired between 15 and 18, depending on whether it settled on the first solution it found or was allowed to run longer. While an automatic bug-repair tool would be useful in its own right, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Martin Rinard, whose group developed the new system, believes that the work could have broader ramifications. “One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is that we’ve found that there are indeed universal properties of correct...