Computer Program Fixes Old Code Faster Than Expert Engineers

An anonymous reader writes: Less than two weeks after one group of MIT researchers unveiled a system capable of repairing software bugs automatically, a different group has demonstrated another system called Helium, which "revamps and fine-tunes code without ever needing the original source, in a matter of hours or even minutes." The process works like this: "The team started with a simple building block of programming that's nevertheless extremely difficult to analyze: binary code that has been stripped of debug symbols, which represents the only piece of code that is available for proprietary software such as Photoshop. ... With Helium, the researchers are able to lift these kernels from a stripped binary and restructure them as high-level representations that are readable in Halide, a CSAIL-designed programming language geared towards image-processing. ... From there, the Helium system then replaces the original bit-rotted components with the re-optimized ones. The net result: Helium can improve the performance of certain Photoshop filters by 75 percent, and the performance of less optimized programs such as Microsoft Windows' IrfanView by 400 to 500 percent." Their full academic paper (PDF) is available online.

Comments

Inaccurate title

[CustomSolvers2]

The paper is not about automatic code optimisation in general. This program only fixes image-related algorithms (which most likely involve simple & repetitive modifications).
In fact, there are quite a few references to Adobe in the associated links and the paper is signed by two Adobe guys. Thus, I guess that it is mostly focused on Adobe products, like Photoshop; and might not even be able to deal with any image-processing algorithm.

PS: is it because of the summer-period lack of news or Slashdot is planning to make the move to pure sensationalism? Because a big proportion of the titles lately are quite unclear (to say it softly).

Re:Support and copyright ...

[angel'o'sphere]

Unfortunately you AC parent is right and you are just an asshole and an idiot.

So has it "fixed" itself?

[Viol8]

Well its the obvious question isn't it - presumably they've eaten their own dog food and run the program on its own binary , right?

Um, because this is a computer doing the work

[rsilvergun]

It's practically free. Run the program, wait a bit and your done. A child or a well trained monkey could do it. You OTOH, cost dollars per hour. Seriously, is anyone else scared shirtless that something so abstract and complex as this can be automated? Is any job safe (outside of being a member of the ruling class)?