Evolutionary computation in Communications of the ACM

The latest Communications of the ACM includes an article on "Automatic Program Repair with Evolutionary Computation" by Westley Weimer, Stephanie Forrest, Claire Le Goues, and ThanhVu Nguyen. This article is based on very nice work which, as noted last summer on this blog, won the top prize in the Human-Competitive Results Competition (the "Humies") at GECCO-2009.

(Hat tip to Bill Langdon.)

GECCO Humies Award (GOLD) 2009

GP was well featured at this year's GECCO Humies Awards. The most spectacular application which was subsequently awarded first prize (GOLD) was based on two papers by Weimer/Nguyen/Le Goues/Forrest
published in proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in May 2009 and Forrest/Weimer/Nguyen/Le Goes in this year's GECCO proceedings. Both papers won awards from the respective conferences, and winning the Humies award was the "icing on the cake".

The authors apply a specialized/improved form of Genetic Programming to locate and repair software bugs. Repairing software bugs is a time consuming and commercially very costly activity. To date, automating the process has been very difficult. The GP method proposed by our Gold Medal winners takes down the average repair time for software bugs from more than 3 hours per bug to 3 minutes.

The authors rightly claim that "showing how to use GP in the context of modern software systems and integrating GP into modern software practice will help evolutionary computation to become more widely accepted by computer scientists."

Congratulations to the authors for a prize well deserved!