Microsoft has created an A.I. that can write its own code

[Matt Graham]

On 2017-03-10 12:59, Keith Smith wrote:
> Please stop now before we end up feuding for days.  I will not go 
> political.

Could people posting politics possibly permute the Subject: line to 
something different?  That way people talking about code-writing bots 
and/or twitter bots could filter that Subject out.

> Let us take this effort and maybe figure out these security and
> hacking issues that are in the forefront.

The article described code-writing software that solved problems that 
required <= 5 lines of code.  This is fairly trivial stuff[0].  However, 
"Microsoft has created a program that writes code to solve certain very 
small problems" is much more boring than "Microsoft has created an AI 
that can write its own code".

If a HypotheticalBot were widely used to write code, then that'd cause 
security/hacking concerns because it'd almost certainly produce a bunch 
of similar solutions to things.  I would guess this'd have roughly the 
same impact as having a large percentage of desktop machines running the 
exact same version of Windows 10.  I Could Be Wrong.

The problems with Tay show that you need to exercise caution when 
letting the internet just pour unfiltered junk into a machine-learning 
algorithm.  There are a lot of jerks out there, they seem to have a lot 
of free time, and they want to amuse themselves at your expense.

Also, a human who is exposed to thousands of people shouting "X is 
bad!" for days at a time will probably start feeling bad about X.  A 
much less sophisticated neural network that has 50% or more of its data 
set filled with variations on "X is bad" will probably create output 
that reflects that.  No idea how you'd get around that.  Periodic 
reboots/purging of bad data?  (This may be one of the functions of REM 
sleep in mammals, but that's getting a little handwavy.)

[0] Unless the lines of code were very long and in Perl.

-- 
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.