But bugs aside, part of the allure of having a program generate a program is that it is much less likely to produce bugs in the first place. That said, we still have a ways to go before we achieve human-like synthetic developers.
>What makes you think that you can give a probability that a program has an infinite loop in it?
I can't. That's why I basically rummage through the code base, using all kinds of heuristics, most of which I make up on the spot. Sometimes it takes me two minutes to find that off-by-one, and other times two days.
Interesting paper. I don't think it will help that much though:
>Ideally, we want to automatically generate patches for all bug reports. Realistically, it is impossible. [...] Even among bugs that can be fixed, some are too complex to be fixed automatically [...] Therefore, a realistic goal is to automatically generate patches for relatively simple bugs [where] the bug reports contain useful information, e.g., the buggy file and the symptom
Hi, I write software for a living. Just replace the most tedious part, please: debugging.
Say what? You can't even give me a probability [1] that my program has an infinite loop in it?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant