Chip giant Intel has unveiled a machine programming research system that can autonomously detect errors in code.
In preliminary tests, the system called ControlFlag trained and learned novel defects on over one billion unlabeled lines of production-quality code, the company said during the ‘Intel Labs Day’ digital event on Thursday.
According to studies, software developers spend approximately 50 per cent of the time debugging.
“With ControlFlag, and systems like it, I imagine a world where programmers spend notably less time debugging and more time on what I believe human programmers do best – expressing creative, new ideas to machines,” said Justin Gottschlich, principal scientist and director/founder of Machine Programming Research at Intel Labs.
It’s estimated that of the $1.25 trillion that software development costs the IT industry every year, 50 per cent is spent debugging code.
According to Intel, it is becoming difficult to find software programmers who have the expertise to correctly, efficiently and securely programme across diverse hardware, which introduces another opportunity for new and harder-to-spot errors in code.
“When fully realised, ControlFlag could help alleviate this challenge by automating the tedious parts of software development, such as testing, monitoring and debugging,” the company said.
ControlFlag’s bug detection capabilities are enabled by machine programming, a fusion of machine learning, formal methods, programming languages, compilers and computer systems.
Intel has started evaluating using ControlFlag internally to identify bugs in its own software and firmware product development.
–IANS