3 research outputs found
Stepping Stones to Inductive Synthesis of Low-Level Looping Programs
Inductive program synthesis, from input/output examples, can provide an
opportunity to automatically create programs from scratch without presupposing
the algorithmic form of the solution. For induction of general programs with
loops (as opposed to loop-free programs, or synthesis for domain-specific
languages), the state of the art is at the level of introductory programming
assignments. Most problems that require algorithmic subtlety, such as fast
sorting, have remained out of reach without the benefit of significant
problem-specific background knowledge. A key challenge is to identify cues that
are available to guide search towards correct looping programs. We present
MAKESPEARE, a simple delayed-acceptance hillclimbing method that synthesizes
low-level looping programs from input/output examples. During search, delayed
acceptance bypasses small gains to identify significantly-improved stepping
stone programs that tend to generalize and enable further progress. The method
performs well on a set of established benchmarks, and succeeds on the
previously unsolved "Collatz Numbers" program synthesis problem. Additional
benchmarks include the problem of rapidly sorting integer arrays, in which we
observe the emergence of comb sort (a Shell sort variant that is empirically
fast). MAKESPEARE has also synthesized a record-setting program on one of the
puzzles from the TIS-100 assembly language programming game.Comment: AAAI 201
Code Building Genetic Programming
In recent years the field of genetic programming has made significant
advances towards automatic programming. Research and development of
contemporary program synthesis methods, such as PushGP and Grammar Guided
Genetic Programming, can produce programs that solve problems typically
assigned in introductory academic settings. These problems focus on a narrow,
predetermined set of simple data structures, basic control flow patterns, and
primitive, non-overlapping data types (without, for example, inheritance or
composite types). Few, if any, genetic programming methods for program
synthesis have convincingly demonstrated the capability of synthesizing
programs that use arbitrary data types, data structures, and specifications
that are drawn from existing codebases. In this paper, we introduce Code
Building Genetic Programming (CBGP) as a framework within which this can be
done, by leveraging programming language features such as reflection and
first-class specifications. CBGP produces a computational graph that can be
executed or translated into source code of a host language. To demonstrate the
novel capabilities of CBGP, we present results on new benchmarks that use
non-primitive, polymorphic data types as well as some standard program
synthesis benchmarks.Comment: Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation
Conference, Genetic Programming Trac
Nic McPhee
Thomas Helmuth, Nicholas Freitag McPhee, and Lee Spector, 2018. Program synthesis using uniform mutation by addition and deletion. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO \u2718), Hernan Aguirre (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1127-1134.https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cosa2018/1028/thumbnail.jp