On December 3rd, 2020, Intel released ControlFlag – a machine learning programming system that autonomously detects errors in code. According to a study, for every $1.25 trillion the IT industry expends on software development every year, 50% is expended on debugging code. Intel believes this new solution will considerably reduce the amount of time and money required to evaluate and debug code.
“Debugging is expected to take an even bigger toll on developers and the industry at large,” Intel announced. “When fully realized, ControlFlag could help alleviate this challenge by automating the tedious parts of software development, such as testing, monitoring, and debugging.”
The company also demonstrated the software needed to operate heterogeneous architecture is becoming extremely complicated and tougher to discover software programmers who have the expertise to securely and correctly program across the hardware. According to the company, ControlFlag will deal with the amount of money, time, and skills that is needed to analyze and debug code.
“A key benefit of ControlFlag’s unsupervised approach to pattern recognition is that it can intrinsically learn to adapt to a developer’s style. With limited inputs for the control tools that the program should be evaluating, ControlFlag can identify stylistic variations in the programming language, similar to the way that readers recognize the differences between full words or using contractions in English,” said Intel.
ControlFlag comprises a fusion of machine learning, machine programming bug detection abilities, programming languages, formal methods, computer systems, and compilers. It can even operate through anomaly detection through which ControlFlag learns from verified examples to discover normal coding patterns and recognize the errors in code that are most likely to result in a bug.
