US Patent 10169208 Similarity scoring of programs

A technique is provided for determining a similarity score between a source program and a test program. The technique includes generating an abstract syntax tree for both programs and converting the subtrees of each syntax tree into hash vectors. Vectors in the abstract syntax tree for the source program are dimension reduced and made accessible in a spatial data structure such as an R-tree. The structure is searched using the hash vectors from the test program abstract syntax tree and candidate matching vectors are found. A search is conducted among the candidate matching vectors for pairs that have a degree of similarity above a given threshold and these are the reported results.