Does anyone use Cleverbot? Have you used it today? Cleverbot is a conversation and knowledge Sim program that learns from its past conversations with other Users.

 

IBM (As you all know is a top knoch computer logistics and development company) plans on bringing they're famed 'WATSON' to doctor offices, and surgical rooms to bring sergeons diagnosis' and analysis on certain medical problems.

 

What if IBM used Watsons advanced Human intellectuall capabilies to understand what people say, to make a so called 'iProgrammer'. All the person does is give watson a full rundown of the system a computer language will be minipulating, and tells watson what he/she wants a program to do. Would this mean lowered computer software engineering jobs, open hacking networks enlarged, or an exponentially growing software development model? What's your opinion on the iProgrammer

 

(Btw WATSON is an AI much like Cleverbot, but thinks for itself, and the situation its presented with)

First off, I am completely and utterly unimpressed by cleverbot. Is it a bot? Yes. Obviously. Is it clever? No. It cannot hold a meaningful conversation. It's very good at giving smug, smarmy, off-topic answers, but that's only because that is what is has been programmed to do.

 

As for your "iProgrammer", the answer depends on what you mean by "give watson a full rundown of the system a computer language will be minipulating, and tells watson what he/she wants a program to do." In one sense, such systems already exist; in fact they've existed for half a century. A computer executes machine instructions. (Arguably, they don't even execute machine instructions any more. They execute microcode. A separate microprogram exists for each machine instruction.) Programmers in general haven't written in machine language for a long, long time. Most of us don't even write assembly. We instead write a full rundown of the system that tells the computer what we want it to do in terms of some third or fourth generation language. In this view, your watson already exists. It's the compiler or interpreter that translates our high level specification into something the computer can execute.

 

In another sense, it ain't gonna happen. What you are describing is the now discredited waterfall model. It didn't work when humans performed that magical step of translating requirements to code. Adding some magical oracle (your "iProgrammer") won't help because the problem with the waterfall model was that we don't know how to give that "full rundown of the system".

Thanks for the insight. That helped me alot.

Ive been involved in research in natural language programming, I'd love to work with someone who is interested in working on this "iProgrammer" because I think it will be very useful.

I thought it would be useful aswell. But he's right (above) technically we already have such a system. But I've been trying to work with making this a reality with the programming language Lua