Re: "C" code from bots (was Re: Oh d-ai-ry d-ai-ry me)

On 31/05/2025 12:02, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 30.05.2025 22:01, Richard Heathfield wrote:

This evening I accidentally bumped into a chatbot, and I wondered
whether it was any good at C programming.
>
I was impressed when it solved Goldbach's Conjecture (admittedly for
small n) and 5-disc Hanoi, but then I thought back to a recent thread
here (which I have no intent of resurrecting), so I asked it if it could
have saved me a job if I'd only asked it a few hours ago.

 Incidentally we yesterday sat together in a beer garden, and for some
computing problem a friend asked a bot for programs ("C" and Perl) to
a question. We got them and another friend was keen enough to test it.
It was practically unusable for the parameters due to its algorithmic
complexity and for reduced parameter sizes it just didn't work. - The
impression I got from looking at the code was that the bot might have
just picked some (maybe popular) public sources matching the question
and reproduces those in the answer. - Are the bots really capable to
"develop" programs?

Probably not, as my C90/C99 test more or less illustrated. It 'knew' of a syntax rule, but failed to apply it correctly.
I just tried again, this time asking for a C90 program to produce a frequency count of colours in a 24-bit bitmap.
It took three laps to make it C90-legal.
I can see how a programmer might be tempted to use AI to get a first draft, but you wouldn't want to bet the farm on the unreviewed code.
--
Richard Heathfield
Email: rjh at cpax dot org dot uk
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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