An application of artificial intelligence (AI) to the development of software is presented for the construction of efficient implementations of programs from formal high-level specifications. Central to this discussion is the notion of program development by means of program transformation. Using this methodology, a formal specification is compiled (either manually or automatically) into an efficient implementation by the repeated application of correctness-preserving, source-to-source transformations. The author considers techniques for data structure selection, the procedural representation of logic assertions, store-versus-compute, finite differencing, loop fusion, and algorithm design methods presented from the point of view of algorithm design and high-level program optimization.