Computer programming is a fundamental tool for life scientists, allowing them to carry out many essential research tasks. However, despite a variety of educational efforts, learning to write code can be a challenging endeavor for both researchers and students in life science disciplines. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have made it possible to translate human-language prompts to functional code, raising questions about whether these technologies can aid (or replace) life scientists' efforts to write code. Using 184 programming exercises from an introductory-bioinformatics course, we evaluated the extent to which one such model -- OpenAI's ChatGPT -- can successfully complete basic- to moderate-level programming tasks. On its first attempt, ChatGPT solved 139 (75.5%) of the exercises. For the remaining exercises, we provided natural-language feedback to the model, prompting it to try different approaches. Within 7 or fewer attempts, ChatGPT solved 179 (97.3%) of the exercises. These findings have important implications for life-sciences research and education. For many programming tasks, researchers no longer need to write code from scratch. Instead, machine-learning models may produce usable solutions. Instructors may need to adapt their pedagogical approaches and assessment techniques to account for these new capabilities that are available to the general public.
We're not able to analyze this paper right now due to high demand.
Please check back later (sorry!).
Generate a summary of this paper on our Pro plan:
We ran into a problem analyzing this paper.