WRITING software is a painstaking business in which you can't afford to slip up: get a single character wrong and the instructions either do nothing or go horribly wrong. In one infamous software error, a misplaced minus sign resulted in a fighter jet's control system flipping the aircraft on its back whenever it crossed the equator.
Now a new system that takes the drudgery—and some of the potential for slip-ups—out of programming is about to be launched. Its inventor hopes it will one day turn us all into programmers.
Bob Brennan. a software engineer at Cambridge-based start-up Synapse Solutions, has developed a piece of software that allows you to write a program by keying in what you want it to do in everyday language.
Dubbed Mi-Tech—short for machine intelligence technology—the software translates a typed wish list into machine code, the basic mathematical language understood by the microprocessors inside computers. But this is no easy task, because everyday language is riddled with ambiguities and double meanings. "Mi-Tech can resolve these ambiguities," claims Brennan, because it has been taught about the significance of context in the English language.
At the heart of Mi-Tech is a store of logical rules. These allow it to extract instructions from statements in ordinary language, which it then translates into machine code. In its present form, Mi-Tech has a limited lexicon of only a few hundred words, but Brennan claims this is sufficient for most of the tasks you might ask it to carry out.