Repairnator is a bot that identifies bugs in open source software integration and creates patches without human intervention, submitting them to the open source project's maintainers under an assumed human identity; it has succeeded in having five of its patches accepted so far.
Repairnator's creator, Martin Monperrus, has found that human software maintainers have a bias against accepting patches generated by bots, but will willingly accept the same code if its author is identified as another human.
To demonstrate that program repair is human-competitive, a program repair bot has to find a high-quality patch before a human does so. In this context, a patch can be considered to be human-competitive if it satisfies the two conditions of timeliness and quality. Timeliness refers to the fact that the system must find a patch before the human developer. In other words, the prototype system must produce patches in the order of magnitude of minutes, not days. Also, the patch generated by the bot must be correct-enough, of similar quality — correct and readable — compared to a patch written by a human. Note that there are patches that look correct from the bot's point of view, yet that are incorrect (this is known as overfitting patches in the literature [6, 3]). Those patches are arguably not human-competitive, because humans would never accept them in their code base.Consequently, for a patch to be human-competitive 1) the bot has to synthesize the patch faster than the human developer 2) the patch has to be judged good-enough by the human developer and permanently merged in the code base.
There is one more aspect to consider. It has been shown that human engineers do not accept contributions from bots as easily as contributions from other humans, even if they are strictly identical [5]. The reason is that humans tend to have a priori biases against machines, and are more tolerant to errors if the contribution comes from a human peer. In the context of program repair, this means that developers may put the bar higher on the quality of the patch, if they know that the patch comes from a bot. This would impede our quest for a human-competitiveness proof in the context of program repair.
Human-competitive Patches in Automatic Program Repair with Repairnator [Martin Monperrus/Medium]
(via Four Short Links)
What are Markov chains? Interactive guide with examples
I've heard of Markov Chains, but I didn't understand them until I visited this site that explains them with simple interactive animations. Look at the illustration above. The gray circle… READ THE REST
Coding challenge goes wrong: creator refuses to pay $5000 prize money
When Mike Goldman offered $5,000 to anyone who could compress a randomly-generated file of their chosen size in early 2001, he thought his money was perfectly safe. After all, it's… READ THE REST
NARA recovers famed 1982 Grace Hopper lecture recorded on obsolete media format
U.S. Navy computer scientist and COBOL inventor Grace Hopper gave a famed lecture in 1982 that was recorded using an obsolete video medium for which no player now exists. Yesterday,… READ THE REST
Learn a new language at your pace with Promova for life
TL;DR: Lifetime access to the Promova app for language learning is now only $54.97 (MSRP $299.99) until Apr. 26 at 11:59p.m. PT. Want to learn a new language in a safe and supportive… READ THE REST
Get the classic Microsoft applications for life, for just $33
TL;DR: Enjoy lifetime access to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for only $32.97 (MSRP $219.99) until Apr. 19 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Stop worrying about subscription fees or expiring licenses — the entire Microsoft Office… READ THE REST
Turn your voice notes into well-written novels for just $400
TL;DR: Aivolut AI Book Creator is the perfect tool for budding authors to dip their toes into the self-publishing industry. Create up to 8 publish-ready full manuscripts per month for just $399.97… READ THE REST