Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

I'm excited to share more on our latest project, AlphaCode - a system to write programs, able to reach roughly median human performance in coding competitions. And that's median competitive programmer performance, not median programmer or median human! In addition to our paper and [cached]official blog post, you can also find my personal take below.

Problem Setup

Coding competitions are difficult even for experienced programmers. Before writing the first character of a program, the first step is to understand the natural language problem description: often spanning several paragraphs in length, problem descriptions do not directly describe the required algorithm, but …

Getting into Machine Learning - 2020

My previous Getting into Machine Learning post is one of my most popular; since then much has changed.

There's a new kid on the block: [cached]JAX. A thin, but powerful layer over Autograd and XLA, it makes it easy to concisely express algorithms with the same syntax as numpy while getting the full performance of TPUs and GPUs.

Especially in combination with higher level libraries such as [cached]Haiku, JAX makes it fun and easy to try new ideas. I've migrated all my own research to JAX and can only recommend it!

The resources I recommended in my previous …