2021

Choose Your Programming Copilot: A Comparison of the Program Synthesis Performance of GitHub Copilot and Genetic Programming

Sobania, Dominik, Briesch, Martin, Rothlauf, Franz

Understand

GitHub Copilot, an extension for the Visual Studio Code development environment powered by the large-scale language model Codex, makes automatic program synthesis available for software developers.

  • This model has been extensively studied in the field of deep learning, however, a comparison to genetic programming, which is also known for its performance in automatic program synthesis, has not yet been carried out.
  • In this paper, we evaluate GitHub Copilot on standard program synthesis benchmark problems and compare the achieved results with those from the genetic programming literature.
  • In addition, we discuss the performance of both approaches.

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