Comment by jcoffland

10 years ago

You mean the government wastes money?

edit: The DARPA site you linked above calls it a "fully automated computer security challenge". They are not claiming it's AI.

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jcoffland

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nl  10 years ago

You mean the government wastes money?

That's a ignorant cheap shot. Speculative, risky research is costly because lots of things don't work.

The DARPA site you linked above calls it a "fully automated computer security challenge". They are not claiming it's AI.

Show me a definition of AI that would include papers published at NIPS/ICML or even AAAI and wouldn't include the same techniques as are used in the DARPA Grand Challenge.

AI is just a label, it isn't something magical.

  • Darmani  10 years ago

    That's actually quite easy to do. The techniques used by the AI community (statistical estimation, numerical optimization, etc) are quite different from the techniques used to do things like the Cyber Grand Challenge (heavy use of SAT and other decision procedures for logical theories, lattice-based program analysis, formal notions of program semantics, etc). If you ask an AI researcher how knowledge of omega-complete partial orders can help automatically win programming contests, you'll get a blank look.

    I'm actually kinda miffed that OpenAI's press release seems to think automatically writing/exploiting programs is an AI problem, and targeted the AI community in their proposals (as opposed to the programming languages community). I'm a program synthesis researcher, and know how to do major aspects of #2 and #3. I know a lot of people who are already working on them (with some quite impressive results, I might add). And none of us are machine learning people.

    The important thing is: the Cyber Grand Challenge is funding a dozen teams to do exactly what OpenAI is hiring for. Call it AI or not, it's being done. You might look at the proposal to automatically exploit systems and call it sci-fi, but I look at it and think "Sure, that sounds doable."

    Today's program analysis and synthesis technology allows for tools far beyond anything programmers see today. I'm excited to be part of a generation of researchers trying to turn it into the programming revolution we've been waiting for.

    • evc123  10 years ago

      @Darmani Can you think of any ways traditional program synthesis techniques could be combined with machine learning to perform #2? Assume your system has access to a large amount of practice problems/solutions to train with.

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