Eco Search: A No-Delay Best-First Search Algorithm for Program Synthesis

Abstract

Many approaches to program synthesis perform a combinatorial search within a large space of programs to find one that satisfies a given specification. To tame the search space blowup, previous works introduced probabilistic and neural approaches to guide this combinatorial search by inducing heuristic cost functions. Best-first search algorithms ensure to search in the exact order induced by the cost function, significantly reducing the portion of the program space to be explored. We present a new best-first search algorithm called Eco Search, which is the first no-delay algorithm for pre-generation cost function: the amount of compute required between outputting two programs is constant, and in particular does not increase over time. This key property yields important speedups: we observe that Eco Search outperforms its predecessors on two classical domains.