On the Diiculty of Benchmarking Inductive Program Synthesis Methods Edward Pantridge omas Helmuth MassMutual Financial Group Washington and Lee University Amherst, Massachuses, USA Lexington, Virginia
[email protected] [email protected] Nicholas Freitag McPhee Lee Spector University of Minnesota, Morris Hampshire College Morris, Minnesota 56267 Amherst, Massachuses, USA
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference format: A variety of inductive program synthesis (IPS) techniques have Edward Pantridge, omas Helmuth, Nicholas Freitag McPhee, and Lee Spector. 2017. On the Diculty of Benchmarking Inductive Program Syn- recently been developed, emerging from dierent areas of com- thesis Methods. In Proceedings of GECCO ’17 Companion, Berlin, Germany, puter science. However, these techniques have not been adequately July 15-19, 2017, 8 pages. compared on general program synthesis problems. In this paper we DOI: hp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3067695.3082533 compare several methods on problems requiring solution programs to handle various data types, control structures, and numbers of outputs. e problem set also spans levels of abstraction; some 1 INTRODUCTION would ordinarily be approached using machine code or assembly Since the creation of Inductive Program Synthesis (IPS) in the language, while others would ordinarily be approached using high- 1970s [15], researchers have been striving to create systems capa- level languages. e presented comparisons are focused on the ble of generating programs competitively with human intelligence. possibility of success; that is, on whether the system can produce Modern IPS methods oen trace their roots to the elds of machine a program that passes all tests, for all training and unseen test- learning, logic programming, evolutionary computation and others.