Intel has announced that its automated code debugging tool ControlFlag is now open source and available for developers to access for free.

ControlFlag’s bug detection capabilities are enabled by machine programming, a fusion of machine learning, formal methods, programming languages, compilers and computer systems.

ControlFlag specifically operates through a capability known as anomaly detection. As humans existing in the natural world, there are certain patterns we learn to consider “normal” through observation. Similarly, ControlFlag learns from verified examples to detect normal coding patterns, identifying anomalies in code that are likely to cause a bug. Moreover, ControlFlag can detect these anomalies regardless of programming language.

A key benefit of ControlFlag’s unsupervised approach to pattern recognition is that it can intrinsically learn to adapt to a developer’s style. With limited inputs for the control tools that the program should be evaluating, ControlFlag can identify stylistic variations in programming language, similar to the way that readers recognize the differences between full words or using contractions in English.

The tool learns to identify and tag these stylistic choices and can customize error identification and solution recommendations based on its insights, which minimizes ControlFlag’s characterizations of code in error that may simply be a stylistic deviation between two developer teams.

Since its introduction, ControlFlag has been tested on production-level software and widely used open-source software systems.