>What makes you think that you can give a probability that a program has an infinite loop in it?
I can't. That's why I basically rummage through the code base, using all kinds of heuristics, most of which I make up on the spot. Sometimes it takes me two minutes to find that off-by-one, and other times two days.
Interesting paper. I don't think it will help that much though:
>Ideally, we want to automatically generate patches for all bug reports. Realistically, it is impossible. [...] Even among bugs that can be fixed, some are too complex to be fixed automatically [...] Therefore, a realistic goal is to automatically generate patches for relatively simple bugs [where] the bug reports contain useful information, e.g., the buggy file and the symptom
As for your request:
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~lintan/publications/r2fix-icst13.p...
But bugs aside, part of the allure of having a program generate a program is that it is much less likely to produce bugs in the first place. That said, we still have a ways to go before we achieve human-like synthetic developers.