Expert system for writing programs?

Question

I am brainstorming an idea of developing a high level software to manipulate matrix algebra equations, tensor manipulations to be exact, to produce optimized C++ code using several criteria such as sizes of dimensions, available memory on the system, etc.

Something which is similar in spirit to tensor contraction engine, TCE, but specifically oriented towards producing optimized rather than general code. The end result desired is software which is expert in producing parallel program in my domain.

• Does this sort of development fall on the category of expert systems?
• What other projects out there work in the same area of producing code given the constraints?

Answer 1

It wouldn't be called an expert system, at least not in the traditional sense of this concept.

Expert systems are rule-based inference engines, whereby the expertise in question is clearly encapsulated in the rules. The system you suggest, while possibly encapsulating insight about the nature of the problem domain inside a linear algebra model of sorts, would act more as a black box than an expert system. One of the characteristics of expert systems is that they can produce an "explanation" of their reasoning, and such a feature is possible in part because the knowledge representation, while formalized, remains close to simple statements in a natural language; matrices and operations on them, while possibly being derived upon similar observation of reality, are a lot less transparent...

It is unclear from the description in the question if the system you propose would optimize existing code (possibly in a limited domain), or if it would produced optimized code, in that case driven bay some external goal/function...

Answer 2

What you are describing is more like a Domain-Specific Language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language