DeepMind gave life to an artificial intelligence system – AlphaCode. It is said to “write computer programs at a competitive level.” This makes it the first AI code generation ever whose performance is competitive enough in programming competitions.

The company was acquired by Google in 2014. It is based in London with research centers in Canada, France, and the US. In a blog post, DeepMind says:

“AlphaCode achieved an estimated rank within the top 54% of participants in programming competitions by solving new problems that require a combination of critical thinking, logic, algorithms, coding, and natural language understanding.”

The new system works with language models which are built on transformers. DeepMind shared that they have selected 10 recent contests, every one of them is newer than their own training data. The company also commented:

“Overall, AlphaCode placed at approximately the level of the median competitor. Although far from winning competitions, this result represents a substantial leap in AI problem-solving capabilities and we hope that our results will inspire the competitive programming community.”

AlphaCode’s performance is hosted on Codeforces – a platform that hosts competitions that are very attractive to participants who are coming with the aim to test their coding skills.

Founder of Codeforces, Mike Mirzayanov, admitted that those results outstripped his expectations.