MIT Invented a Way to Automatically Fix Software Bugs With Borrowed Code

[froggyboy604]

A new system from MIT’s CSAIL, or Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, does something incredible to fix buggy software: It borrows healthy code from other applications–and then fixes the bug without ever accessing the original source code.
 
Think of it as an organ transplant. Except in this case, the sick patient is a buggy software app. And the “donor organ” is a piece of code from another application, even if it’s written in a whole different language. That’s a crude and imperfect metaphor, but it helps explain CodePhage, a system that was presented by MIT researchers at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Programming Language Design and Implementation conference this month, as MIT News explains today.
 
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This is good news for students who are new to programming.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

seems like it could put programmers out of a job.

 

[lb]

Strange... Programming languages are so different from each other that it would make the borrowed pieces of code incompatible... I'm curious to see how this turns out...

 

[Demon_Skeith]

Not to mention once you combine the code it would become even more extremely hard to read and fix.

 

[VirusZero]

On one hand this is a very cool idea.

However it's also extremely terrifying because it's one more link in a chain that could end really poorly for us. Consider the fact we are working on humanoid robots (and in many cases are having some success... See Honda's Asimo) which is all well and good. Then we're looking at artificial intelligence and we're going kind of slow there, but one day it'll be possible. Now we have programs that can fix other programs. So what happens if all these things combine? 
It seems like a good idea to ensure that a robot's operating code is as bug free as possible (to prevent any malfunctions which could result in harm to the machine or us)... but how much freedom to rewrite/overwrite code does this have? How exactly does it determine which code is broken? What if by accident a section of code gets deemed broken/buggy is actually a piece that protects us? (Basically this would allow machines to overwrite their own programming and essentially negate the 3 laws.)