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Our paper compares the correctness, efficiency, and maintainability of human-generated and AI-generated program code. For that, we analyzed the computational resources of AI- and human-generated program code using metrics such as time and space complexity as well as runtime and memory usage. Additionally, we evaluated the maintainability using metrics such as lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, Halstead complexity and maintainability index. For our experiments, we had generative AIs produce program code in Java, Python, and C++ that solves problems defined on the competition coding website leetcode.com. We selected six LeetCode problems of varying difficulty, resulting in 18 program codes generated by each generative AI. GitHub Copilot, powered by Codex (GPT-3.0), performed best, solving 9 of the 18 problems (50.0%), whereas CodeWhisperer did not solve a single problem. BingAI Chat (GPT-4.0) generated correct program code for seven problems (38.9%), ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) and Code Llama (Llama 2) for four problems (22.2%) and StarCoder and InstructCodeT5+ for only one problem (5.6%). Surprisingly, although ChatGPT generated only four correct program codes, it was the only generative AI capable of providing a correct solution to a coding problem of difficulty level hard. In summary, 26 AI-generated codes (20.6%) solve the respective problem. For 11 AI-generated incorrect codes (8.7%), only minimal modifications to the program code are necessary to solve the problem, which results in time savings between 8.9% and even 71.3% in comparison to programming the program code from scratch.

The video games industry develops ever more advanced technologies to improve rendering, image quality, ergonomics and user experience of their creations providing very simple to use tools to design new games. In the molecular sciences, only a small number of experts with specialized know-how are able to design interactive visualization applications, typically static computer programs that cannot easily be modified. Are there lessons to be learned from video games? Could their technology help us explore new molecular graphics ideas and render graphics developments accessible to non-specialists? This approach points to an extension of open computer programs, not only providing access to the source code, but also delivering an easily modifiable and extensible scientific research tool. In this work, we will explore these questions using the Unity3D game engine to develop and prototype a biological network and molecular visualization application for subsequent use in research or education. We have compared several routines to represent spheres and links between them, using either built-in Unity3D features or our own implementation. These developments resulted in a stand-alone viewer capable of displaying molecular structures, surfaces, animated electrostatic field lines and biological networks with powerful, artistic and illustrative rendering methods. We consider this work as a proof of principle demonstrating that the functionalities of classical viewers and more advanced novel features could be implemented in substantially less time and with less development effort. Our prototype is easily modifiable and extensible and may serve others as starting point and platform for their developments. A webserver example, standalone versions for MacOS X, Linux and Windows, source code, screen shots, videos and documentation are available at the address: http://unitymol.sourceforge.net/.

At present, the explosive growth of software code volume and quantity makes the code review process very labor-intensive and time-consuming. An automated code review model can assist in improving the efficiency of the process. Tufano et al., designed two automated tasks to help improve the efficiency of code review based on the deep learning approach, from two different perspectives, namely, the developer submitting the code and the code reviewer. However, they only used code sequence information and did not explore the logical structure information with a richer meaning of the code. To improve the learning of code structure information, a program dependency graph serialization algorithm PDG2Seq algorithm is proposed, which converts the program dependency graph into a unique graph code sequence in a lossless manner, while retaining the program structure information and semantic information. We then designed an automated code review model based on the pre-trained model CodeBERT architecture, which strengthens the learning of code information by fusing program structure information and code sequence information, and then fine-tuned the model according to the code review activity scene to complete the automatic modification of the code. To verify the efficiency of the algorithm, the two tasks in the experiment were compared with the best Algorithm 1-encoder/2-encoder. The experimental results show that the model we proposed has a significant improvement under the BLEU, Lewinshtein distance and ROUGE-L metrics.

In the realm of software development, automated program repair (APR) emerges as a pivotal technique, autonomously debugging faulty code to boost productivity. Despite the notable advancements of large pre-trained language models of code (PLMCs) in code generation, their efficacy in complex tasks like APR remains suboptimal. This limitation is attributed to the generic development of PLMCs, whose specialized potential for APR is yet be to fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel approach designed to enhance PLMCs’ APR performance through source code augmentation and curriculum learning. Our approach employs code augmentation operators to generate a spectrum of syntactically varied yet semantically congruent bug-fixing programs, thus enriching the dataset’s diversity. Furthermore, we design a curriculum learning strategy, enabling PLMCs to develop a deep understanding of program semantics from these enriched code variants, thereby refining their APR fine-tuning prowess. We apply our approach across different PLMCs and systematically evaluate it on three benchmarks: BFP-small, BFP-medium, and Defects4J. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms both original models and existing baseline methods, demonstrating the promising future of adapting PLMCs for code debugging in practice.

Ray tracing software systems are commonly used to analyze the optics of solar energy devices, since they allow to predict the energy gains of devices in real conditions, and also to compare them with other systems constantly emerging in the market. However, the available open-source packages apply excessive simplifications to the model of light-matter interaction, making that the optical behaviour of the systems can not be properly characterized, which in turn implies disagreements between physical experiments and computer simulations. We present here the open source python package OTSun, which applies the Fresnel equations in their most general form, without further simplifications, and is suitable for the simulation of both solar-thermal and photovoltaic systems. The geometrical objects used in this package are created using the parametric 3D modeler FreeCAD, which is also a free and open source program and allows for the construction of arbitrary geometries that can be analyzed with OTSun. These, and other software capabilities, make OTSun extremely flexible and accurate for the optical analysis of solar devices with arbitrary geometry. Additionally, OTSun has a companion webtool, OTSunWebApp, that allows for the usage of certain features of the package without the need to install anything locally. We also show here two numerical experiments that we performed in order to validate the model and implementation: The analysis of the optical efficiency of a Linear Fresnel Reflector (with moving objects), and of a second surface mirror (with variable wavelengths). In each case, the numerical computations had deviations of less than 0.25% from reference models (either computed with another program or with exact formulas).

Background Targeted amplicon sequencing of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene is one of the key tools for studying microbial diversity. The accuracy of this approach strongly depends on the choice of primer pairs and, in particular, on the balance between efficiency, specificity and sensitivity in the amplification of the different bacterial 16S sequences contained in a sample. There is thus the need for computational methods to design optimal bacterial 16S primers able to take into account the knowledge provided by the new sequencing technologies. Results We propose here a computational method for optimizing the choice of primer sets, based on multi-objective optimization, which simultaneously: 1) maximizes efficiency and specificity of target amplification; 2) maximizes the number of different bacterial 16S sequences matched by at least one primer; 3) minimizes the differences in the number of primers matching each bacterial 16S sequence. Our algorithm can be applied to any desired amplicon length without affecting computational performance. The source code of the developed algorithm is released as the mopo16S software tool (Multi-Objective Primer Optimization for 16S experiments) under the GNU General Public License and is available at http://sysbiobig.dei.unipd.it/?q=Software#mopo16S . Conclusions Results show that our strategy is able to find better primer pairs than the ones available in the literature according to all three optimization criteria. We also experimentally validated three of the primer pairs identified by our method on multiple bacterial species, belonging to different genera and phyla. Results confirm the predicted efficiency and the ability to maximize the number of different bacterial 16S sequences matched by primers.

Quantum error-correcting codes are essential for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Heavy hexagonal code is a type of topological code that leverages the arrangement of qubits to find and correct errors. The heavy hexagonal code is suitable for superconducting architectures, specifically graph layouts with a limited number of connections. The topological error correction methods work well, but they need more qubits, cannot be used for different sizes of quantum systems, are less reliable, and do not work well with changing quantum distributions. Thus, the research proposes an Ardea-guided exploit optimized sparse-dual attention enabled meta-learning-based convolutional neural network with bi-directional long short-term memory model (AGuESD-MCBiTM). The method exhibits effective correction over dynamic environments with the utilization of meta-learning and the extraction of statistical information, which provides a detailed representation of the qubit patterns. The Ardea-guided exploit optimized (AGuEO) algorithm tunes the weights of MCBiTM and acquires optimal solutions with higher convergence. Moreover, the sparse-dual attention module and meta-learning-based MCBiTM model, which together provide scalable, real-time identification of non-linear qubit noise fluctuations with lower computational cost. Comparatively, the proposed AGuESD-MCBiTM exhibits superior error correction with a higher correlation of 0.97, accuracy of 98.93%, and R-squared value of 0.93, as well as a lower Root mean square error of 1.87, Mean absolute error of 1.20, Bit error rate of 1.85, Logical error rate of 3.82, and mean square error of 3.49 in circuit 2, respectively.

This paper presents a comparative performance analysis of two popular PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) frameworks-Codelgniter and CakePHP-within the scope of modern web application development. The evaluation was performed through the implementation of an online book catalogue application, where core CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations were benchmarked using Apache JMeter. The objective was to provide an impartial assessment of each framework's efficiency and responsiveness under identical conditions.

This paper presents MultiGLICE (Multi class Graph Neural Network with Program Slice), a model for static code analysis to detect security vulnerabilities. MultiGLICE extends our previous GLICE model with multiclass detection for a large number of vulnerabilities across multiple programming languages. It builds upon the earlier SySeVR and FUNDED models and uniquely integrates inter-procedural program slicing with a graph neural network. Users can configure the depth of the inter-procedural analysis, which allows a trade-off between the detection performance and computational efficiency. Increasing the depth of the inter-procedural analysis improves the detection performance, at the cost of computational efficiency. We conduct experiments with MultiGLICE for the multiclass detection of 38 different CWE types in C/C++, C#, Java, and PHP code. We evaluate the trade-offs in the depth of the inter-procedural analysis and compare its vulnerability detection performance and resource usage with those of prior models. Our experimental results show that MultiGLICE improves the weighted F1-score by about 23% when compared to the FUNDED model adapted for multiclass classification. Furthermore, MultiGLICE offers a significant improvement in computational efficiency. The time required to train the MultiGLICE model is approximately 17 times less than that of FUNDED.

In recent years, the number and scale of malicious codes have grown exponentially, posing an increasing threat to cybersecurity. Hence, it is of great research value to quickly identify variants of malware and master their family information. Binary code similarity detection, as a key technique in reverse analysis, plays an indispensable role in malware analysis. However, most existing methods focus on similarity at the function or basic block level, ignoring the modular composition of malware. Implementing similarity detection among malware modules would greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of homology detection. Inspired by the successful application of deep-learning techniques in program analysis, we propose a binary code module similarity detection method called ModDiff. It abstracts malware into attribute graphs, clusters functions using graph-embedded clustering algorithms to decompose malware into function-based modules, and calculates module similarity using graph-matching algorithms and natural language processing-based function similarity detection algorithms. The experimental results indicated that ModDiff improves the accuracy of module partitioning by 10.8% compared with previous work, and the highest F1 score of 89% is achieved in malware homologation detection. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of ModDiff in detecting and analyzing malware with important application value and development prospects.