Automated bug fixing: an interview with Westley Weimer, Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia and Martin Monperrus, University of Lille and INRIA, Lille, France

Fixing bugs manually is expensive, time-consuming, and unpleasant. How about getting the computer to fix the bugs, automatically? Automatically repairing them might save us from misunderstandings, lack of time, carelessness, or plain old laziness. But this brings into question some fundamental limitations. Yet in the past 10 years, a number of young scientists have taken on automatic bug fixing. This interview discusses the approximations currently in use and how far they can take us.