Program synthesis
In computer science, program synthesis is the task to construct a program that provably satisfies a given high-level formal specification. In contrast to program verification, the program is to be constructed rather than given; however, both fields make use of formal proof techniques, and both comprise approaches of different degrees of automation. In contrast to automatic programming techniques, specifications in program synthesis are usually non-algorithmic statements in an appropriate logical calculus.[1]
The primary application of program synthesis is to relieve the programmer of the burden of writing correct, efficient code that satisfies a specification. However, program synthesis also has applications to superoptimization and inference of loop invariants.[2]
Origin[edit]
During the Summer Institute of Symbolic Logic at Cornell University in 1957, Alonzo Church defined the problem to synthesize a circuit from mathematical requirements.[3] Even though the work only refers to circuits and not programs, the work is considered to be one of the earliest descriptions of program synthesis and some researchers refer to program synthesis as "Church's Problem". In the 1960s, a similar idea for an "automatic programmer" was explored by researchers in artificial intelligence.
Since then, various research communities considered the problem of program synthesis. Notable works include the 1969 automata-theoretic approach by Büchi and Landweber,[4] and the works by Manna and Waldinger (c. 1980). The development of modern high-level programming languages can also be understood as a form of program synthesis.