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 …