Putting numbers in order like never before, so much so as to write programs: an artificial intelligence system has learned to do it and what may seem like a trivial operation is instead an important tool in the world of information technology. The system is called AlphaDev, is described in the journal Nature and created under the guidance of Daniel Mankowitz of DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet), designed to generate programs in the most common language used today for programming.
“The work of DeepMind researchers focused on a problem that may seem trivial, namely ordering sequences of numbers, for example you have (3,2,5) and you want to sort them in ascending order. It seems trivial but they are routines that in practice are used an infinite number of times, they are the basis for ordering much longer sequences, which in turn are some of the main things required of a computer”, commented to ANSA the AI expert of the La Sapienza University of Rome, Simone Scardapane. Simple algorithms such as those for sorting numbers are essential for most of the more complex calculations and their improvement has now reached limits that are increasingly difficult to overcome, real bottlenecks that limit the development of further improvements.
For years DeepMind has dedicated itself to the development of algorithms capable of playing extremely complex games, one of the great recent achievements was in Go, the ancient oriental strategy game considered almost impossible for a computer until a few years ago, in which 2015 and 2016 their software defeated the best human champions. Precisely from this experience they have developed a new ‘game’, this time in ordering sequences of numbers in the shortest possible time. “The interesting thing – concluded Scardapane – is that in some cases they have found sequences that are better than the ones we have used up to now, which is quite remarkable considering how fundamental the problem is”.
Source: Ansa
I am a journalist with over 6 years of experience working in the news industry. I currently work as an author for Global Happenings, and my coverage focuses on Technology news. I have written for various publications, including Reuters, The New York Times and The Guardian.
