[colinshark]

Can I get a less intense summary?

[antics]

Say you have a list of full names and you want to teach a computer to get the first name out of each.

With "program synthesis", you provide a couple example outputs, and the computer tries to generate ("synthesize") a program that turns the input (i.e., the full name) into the output (i.e., just the first name).

Basically, this works as follows. You generate a ton of candidate programs, and then rank them that work for the input, and choose the "best" among them, and return that. The ranking is a bit of an art though.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

"you can make computers do things you have to think about to understand."

[makmanalp]

or maybe even "you can get computers to figure things out, and it's cool when the computer reasons something in a way you hadn't thought of"