

A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair - nreece
http://www.genetic-programming.org/hc2009/1-Forrest/Forrest-Paper-on-Repair.pdf

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unignorant
This research group has made a great deal of progress since the writing of
that paper. They have repaired much larger programs (most referenced here are
unix utilities) using many more (100s) of positive test cases. As someone who
is in a position to know a bit about their work, I find it very exciting.

As some comments seem to have slightly misinterpreted the work, I'd like to
clarify that the genetic algorithm does not find undocumented bugs. One needs,
at minimum, a negative test case and some number of positive cases to begin
the repair process. While the ga's fitness function attempts to ensure that no
new bugs are introduced, this is of course impossible to establish with
certainty. As the number of available and independent positive test cases
increases, the repair becomes increasingly robust.

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nreece
Winner of the GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE award:
<http://www.genetic-programming.org/hc2009/cfe2009.html>

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Yrlec
I haven't read the entire report but it looks really cool. If I understand it
correctly it can automatically detect and fix bugs previously found in other
software. Would be really cool if you would have a huge database of known bugs
which you can detect automatically. Kind of like collaborative unit-testing.

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jules
It uses existing unit tests, so it doesn't find bugs by itself. I _does_ try
to find which code is responsible, if that's what you mean.

