Facebook researchers have earned a major milestone building AI that can convert from one coding language to another. The transcoder is the name given to one language to another converter. The AI can convert languages like C++, Python & Java into one another.
According to Facebook, it requires minimum human supervision making the AI almost independent. Converting one program into another takes a lot of efforts and if the news is true that is a major discovery. Today billions are been spend for such a process and this may be a major business move by Facebook. The transcoder is trained on GitHub containing 2.8 Million OpenSource codes to learn from.
“TransCoder can easily be generalized to any programming language, does not require any expert knowledge, and outperforms commercial solutions by a large margin,”
“Our results suggest that a lot of mistakes made by the model could easily be fixed by adding simple constraints to the decoder to ensure that the generated functions are syntactically correct, or by using dedicated architectures.”
The Co-Authors Wrote
The following were the results when Transcoder was used in different conversions.
- C++ to Java – 74.8% Success
- C++ to Python – 67.2% Success
- Java to C++ – 91.6% Success
- Python to Java – 56.1% Success
- Python to C++ – 57.8% Success
- Java to Python- 68.7% Succes
“ really just trying to eliminate the minutiae of creating software,”
“ could help accelerate productivity … bugging. increase the number of jobs because people who don’t have a programming background will be able to take their creative intuition and capture that via machine by these intentionality interfaces.”
Justin Gottschlich told VentureBeat in a recent interview.
Although Success rates maybe not satisfactory this will make the work much easier when human work is considered.