[fpc-devel] An interesting thought... AI

[J. Gareth Moreton]

That's fair.  Currently in my eyes it's more of an academic curiosity 
currently that i would probably take parts of and program conventionally.

Funny how you mention "black box" because recently there was a news 
article about scientists increasingly not understanding why machine 
learning is working the way it is with apparent patterns of emergent 
behaviour.

Kit

On 10/11/2022 22:17, Sven Barth wrote:
> Am 10.11.2022 um 19:10 schrieb J. Gareth Moreton via fpc-devel:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> This has been something that has been on my mind for a while now, but 
>> with my increasingly more complex optimisations being developed for 
>> the Free Pascal Compiler and the code becoming an ever bigger 
>> spiderweb of conditions, it got me to start wondering... might 
>> compiler optimisation be a candidate for AI? Often I try to 
>> hand-optimise assembly language to get the same output in fewer 
>> cycles (and fewer bytes too if possible), and then see if I can 
>> program the compiler to match it.  I can't hope to catch every 
>> possible optimisation though, and I wonder if using an AI in some way 
>> to develop more efficient machine code has ever been a serious 
>> contender for research.  I have heard of stories like the Deepmind AI 
>> finding a faster way to multiply matrices, so it seems logical that 
>> it can improve instruction processes.
>
> You still need to feed the model with the necessary rules and with 
> necessary training data of both correct and incorrect approaches.
>
> But even then *I* wouldn't want to have any of that black box mambo 
> jumbo in FPC, cause when a bug occurs in the optimizations due to some 
> decision the model made... well... tough luck. With the current 
> approach you need to bash your head a bit against the next wall to 
> find the location of the issue, but with a machine learning approach 
> (let's not call it AI, cause there's nothing “intelligent” about that) 
> you can't even do that. You can only fiddle with what you fed into the 
> model and hope for the best (and wonder why it now fails at a 
> completely different area).
>
> Regards,
> Sven
>