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Ubisoft is Using AI To Catch Bugs in Games Before Devs Make Them (wired.co.uk)
AI has a new task: helping to keep the bugs out of video games. From a report: At the recent Ubisoft Developer Conference in Montreal, the French gaming company unveiled a new AI assistant for its developers. Dubbed Commit Assistant, the goal of the AI system is to catch bugs before they're ever committed into code, saving developers time and reducing the number of flaws that make it into a game before release. "I think like many good ideas, it's like 'how come we didn't think about that before?'," says Yves Jacquier, who heads up La Forge, Ubisoft's R&D division in Montreal. His department partners with local universities including McGill and Concordia to collaborate on research intended to advance the field of artificial intelligence as a whole, not just within the industry.
La Forge fed Commit Assistant with roughly ten years' worth of code from across Ubisoft's software library, allowing it to learn where mistakes have historically been made, reference any corrections that were applied, and predict when a coder may be about to write a similar bug. "It's all about comparing the lines of code we've created in the past, the bugs that were created in them, and the bugs that were corrected, and finding a way to make links [between them] to provide us with a super-AI for programmers," explains Jacquier.
La Forge fed Commit Assistant with roughly ten years' worth of code from across Ubisoft's software library, allowing it to learn where mistakes have historically been made, reference any corrections that were applied, and predict when a coder may be about to write a similar bug. "It's all about comparing the lines of code we've created in the past, the bugs that were created in them, and the bugs that were corrected, and finding a way to make links [between them] to provide us with a super-AI for programmers," explains Jacquier.
The more things change, the more they stay the same....
Anybody else remember LINT? I used to work a project that required that all compiler warnings be dealt with and anything reported by LINT was documented and explained IN THE CODE. It certainly didn't catch everything but it sure kept the code consistent and common logical issues from appearing too often.
Now off my lawn....(snicker)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
AI: "Based on years of historical pattern matching, your commit has been flagged as 'needs review' for the following reasons:
1 - First name of developer is 'Fred'"
How am I supposed to write myself a new minivan now?!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
delete this
"I'm sorry. I can't do that, Dave."
I remember it being discussed in my software engineering class that trying to automate bug removal or detection could be shown to be isomorphic to solving Turing's halting problem.
Many people misunderstand the halting problem. It doesn't mean that you can't tell if a program halts. It just means you can't do so for ALL programs.
Likewise, automated bug detection is possible. It just won't find ALL bugs.
If it finds even 10% of the bugs, it is still a huge win. False positives are unlikely to be a show stopper: Like existing static-analysis, even if the false positives are not bugs, they are still often sloppy code that makes programs less readable.
This sounds more like Clippy.
"I see you are trying to write a state machine..."
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
For any given program f running on Microsoft Windows it will halt if you let it run long enough.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I disagree. This is 10% less opportunity for the coders to increase their skills finding bugs ...
If you truly believe that more bugs are better, then you could just train the AI to insert extra bugs instead of detecting existing bugs.
As a second negative effect, this will lead PHBs to decide that they can now hire even cheaper coders.
If you truly believe that more bugs are better, then you should see this as a good thing, Bad programmers who write crappy code will give others plenty of bugs to practice on. Right?
Good luck.