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It just occurred to me that AI in the nearish future will probably/almost certainly be able to do this.

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It was a staple of Asimov’s books that while trying to predict decisions of the robot brain, nobody in that world ever understood how they fundamentally worked.

He said that while the first few generations were programmed by humans, everything since that was programmed by the previous generation of programs.

This leads us to Asimov’s world in which nobody is even remotely capable of creating programs that violate the assumptions built into the first iteration of these systems - are we at that point now?

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No. Programs cannot reprogram themselves in a useful way and are very very far from it.

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Then how does polymorphic/self-modifying code work?

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I can’t wait for AI to make a PC port of every console game ever so that we can finally stop using emulators.

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This won’t happen in our lifetime. Not only because this is more complex than rambling vaguely correlated human speech while hallucinating half the time.

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Off the shelf models do this, yes.

Sophisticated local trained models on expensive private hardware are already dunking on publicly available versions. The problem of hallucination is generally resolved in those contexts

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AI can literally read minds. I don’t think it’s that great of a step to say it should be able to decompile a few games.

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Idk the specifics, but what you say makes it sound like it would be easier to create an AI that recreates a game based on gameplay visuals (and the relevant controls)

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Do what?

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What about server site executed code?

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Okay, boomer here, be gentle.

So back in the ‘70s I dabbled in programming (now called “coding”, I hear). I only did higher-level languages like Fortran, Cobol, IBM Basic, but a friend had a job (at age 13!) programming in assembler. Is assembler now called assembly, or are they different?

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I thought that the assembler is a specific program that translates mnemonics into the corresponding machine code. Perhaps in early computing this was done by hand so a person was the assembler (and worked in assembler), but now that is handled by software (and supports various macros). So programming in assembly would generate a stream of text that must be assembled by an assembler. (Although I have heard people refer to programming in assembler as well, just not often.)

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I hear people say “program in assembler” but IMO that’s wrong. I’d say you write the code in “assembly language” (or better yet, the actual architecture you’re using like “x86 assembly”) but you “assemble” it with an “assembler”. Kind of like how you could write a program in the “C language” and “compile” it with a “compiler”

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A compiler and an assembler do wildly different things though. An assembler simply replaces mnemonics while a compiler transfers instructions to a whole other language.

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No, it is wrong. Machine code is not source code.

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Never heard of a decompiler I see.

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A decompiler won’t give you the source code. Just some code that might not even necessarily work when compiled back.

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From the point of view of the decompiler machine code is indeed the source code though

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Try converting from English to Japanese and back to English.

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xor ax, ax

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