Programming PuzzlesDownload PDF

Published: 29 Jul 2021, Last Modified: 22 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2021 Datasets and Benchmarks Track (Round 1)Readers: Everyone
Keywords: programming puzzles, program synthesis, language models, GPT-3, Python, coding, problems, dataset
TL;DR: A new type of programming challenge with a diverse set of puzzles (from basics to open problems) defined solely in Python code and supporting self-training of solvers (e.g. program synthesis and language models) for evaluating programming proficiency
Abstract: We introduce a new type of programming challenge called programming puzzles, as an objective and comprehensive evaluation of program synthesis, and release an open-source dataset of Python Programming Puzzles (P3). Each puzzle is defined by a short Python program $f$, and the goal is to find an input which makes $f$ return True. The puzzles are objective in that each one is specified entirely by the source code of its verifier $f$, so evaluating $f$ is all that is needed to test a candidate solution. They do not require an answer key or input/output examples, nor do they depend on natural language understanding. The dataset is comprehensive in that it spans problems of a range of difficulties and domains, ranging from trivial string manipulation problems, to classic programming puzzles (e.g., Tower of Hanoi), to interview/competitive-programming problems (e.g., dynamic programming), to longstanding open problems in algorithms and mathematics (e.g., factoring). We develop baseline enumerative program synthesis, GPT-3 and Codex solvers that are capable of solving puzzles---even without access to any reference solutions---by learning from their own past solutions. Codex performs best, solving up to 18% of 397 test problems with a single try and 80% of the problems with 1,000 tries per problem. In a small user study, we find a positive correlation between puzzle-solving performance and coding experience, and between the puzzle difficulty for humans and AI solvers. Therefore, further improvements on P3 could have a significant impact on many program synthesis areas.
Supplementary Material: zip
URL: https://github.com/microsoft/PythonProgrammingPuzzles
Contribution Process Agreement: Yes
Author Statement: Yes
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2106.05784/code)
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