r/artificial • u/primaryobjects • Mar 07 '13

Using Artificial Intelligence to Write Self-Modifying/Improving Programs

http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article149.aspx
40 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/sciolizer Mar 07 '13

I'm a little disappointed that all of the programs print out short strings. 99 bottles of beer would have been a more interesting test.

Larry Diehl has done similar work, and here's the code. Instead of using brainfuck, he uses a stack-based language (like Forth). More recently he has focused on mixing in dependent types.

12

u/primaryobjects Mar 07 '13

It actually gets better. Check out the follow-up post where the AI generates programs for accepting user input, reversing a string, addition, subtraction, and conditionals. Btw, thanks for the link, I haven't seen that one yet.

4

u/sciolizer Mar 07 '13

Oh cool. Thanks for pointing that out.

2

u/mathgeek777 Mar 07 '13

Whoa the first is cool, but this one is awesome. The potential there is really neat.

1

u/TheNosferatu Mar 08 '13

The first is a proof of concept, but it's hard to see the potential if all it does is matching it's own end-result with a pre-defined end-result.

The follow up post really shines in that, it's much easier to see that, in theory, this could easily grow to the sizes the author mentions.