One of China’s top science research institutes has suspended an academic after finding that his “fully independently developed” programming language was based on a widely-used precursor, Python.
Liu Lei, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, announced last week that his research group had “independently” developed a new programming language, named Mulan after the legendary heroine, and touted as having “applications for artificial intelligence and the internet of things”.
Days later, Mr Liu wrote an apology to domestic media for “exaggerating” his achievements. Mr Liu admitted that Mulan was based on Python, a programming language whose components are freely available under an “open-source” licence, and that it was primarily designed for teaching programming to children, not for AI applications.