DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary based in the UK, has created a new AI-powered system called AlphaCode which can write computer programs “at a competitive level”.

AlphaCode was entered into coding competitions between humans and emerged within the top 54pc of programmers by solving problems that require a combination of critical thinking, natural language processing and human-like creativity.

DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 in a $500m deal, said that AlphaCode was entered into 10 recent contests – all of which were newer than the data it was trained on – and it performed about as well as the median competitor, the first time AI has achieved this feat.

Mike Mirzayanov, the founder of Codeforces which hosted the competitions, said that despite his scepticism, AlphaCode exceeded his expectations.

“I was sceptical because even in simple competitive problems it is often required not only to implement the algorithm, but also – and this is the most difficult part – to invent it. AlphaCode managed to perform at the level of a promising new competitor,” he said.

Problem solving abilities such as the ones needed for such competitions are usually considered beyond the ability of existing AI models. However, AlphaCode was able to stand its ground because of advances in large-scale transformer models, which can parse both natural language and code.

Transformer models allow AI systems to write code much in the way Gmail’s smart compose feature works and is used by other similar applications such as Microsoft-owned Github’s predictive text for programmers tool, GPT-3, which was recently given developer access.

Petr Mitrichev, a Google software engineer and competitive programmer, expressed his surprise at the performance of AlphaCode because competitive programming “is a really hard thing to do, requiring both good coding skills and problem solving creativity in humans”.

“I was very impressed that AlphaCode could make progress in this area, and excited to see how the model uses its statement understanding to produce code and guide its random exploration to create solutions,” he said.

DeepMind has made many AI breakthroughs in recent years. In 2020, it claimed that its AlphaFold AI program solved a half-century-old puzzle of protein folding, which went on to establish a detailed database of proteins last year.

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