Evaluating a large language model's ability to solve programming exercises from an introductory bioinformatics course.

ABSTRACT: Computer programming is a fundamental tool for life scientists, allowing them to carry out essential research tasks. However, despite various educational efforts, learning to write code can be a challenging endeavor for students and researchers in life-sciences 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 tool-OpenAI's ChatGPT-could successfully complete programming tasks. ChatGPT solved 139 (75.5%) of the exercises on its first attempt. For the remaining exercises, we provide

SUBMITTER: Piccolo SR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10564134 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature