Guide | How To Write 1000 Lines Code in Just 50 Lines with New Programming Language “Picture”

[Petrovic]

But to makes things simpler and enable incorporation in everyday programming, the research powerhouse that is MIT has developed a probabilistic programming language called “Picture” – and extension of Julia, another programming language developed at MIT. In fact, Picture is such a powerful language that researchers at MIT have been able to accomplish computer vision tasks in less than 50 lines of code which are competitive with conventional system containing thousands of lines of code.

“This is the first time that we’re introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area,” says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper. “The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code, and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems.”

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[Paul B.]

Amazing stuff, but the problem is using technology this powerful for the good. Man hasn't changed, and anything we accomplish ends up in evil hands eventually. I think of the Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall" (I believe it was), where the evening news carried a video of a shootout which completely reversed the roles of the bad guys and the good guy. We're not far from that, considering both the level of technology and the moral caliber of many in authority.

 

[artifice22]

Extraordinary.

The evolution is real. :O

 

[davidp]

Really interested in learning more, as well as seeing how this evolves (hopefully not on its own!) in the coming years. Sad that I haven't heard this get more press, given that it has already been over a year.