alt Hacker NewsThe problem is that it will have been trained on multiple open source spectrum emulators. Even "don't access the internet" isn't going to help much if it can parrot someone else's emulator verbatim just from training.
Maybe a more sensible challenge would be to describe a system that hasn't previously been emulated before (or had an emulator source released publicly as far as you can tell from the internet) and then try it.
For fun, try using obscure CPUs giving it the same level of specification as you needed for this, or even try an imagined Z80-like but swapping the order of the bits in the encodings and different orderings for the ALU instructions and see how it manages it.
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> try using obscure CPUs
I tried asking Gemini and ChatGPT, "What opcode has the value 0x3c on the Intel 8048?"
They were both wrong. The datasheet with the correct encodings is easily found online. And there are several correct open source emulators, eg MAME.
> try using obscure CPUs
Better still invent a CPU instruction set, and get it to write an emulator for that instruction set in C.
Then invent a C-like HLL and get it to write a compiler from your HLL to your instruction set.
I thought this part of the write-up was interesting:
"This is, I think, in contradiction with the idea that LLMs are memorizing the whole training set and uncompress what they have seen. LLMs can memorize certain over-represented documents and code, but while they can extract such verbatim parts of the code if prompted to do so, they don’t have a copy of everything they saw during the training set, nor they spontaneously emit copies of already seen code, in their normal operation."
Can't things basically get baked into the weights when trained on enough iterations, and isn't this the basis for a lot of plagiarism issues we saw with regards to code and literature? It seems like this is maybe downplaying the unattributed use of open source code when training these models.
If you did that, comments would be "it's just a bit shuffle of the encodings, of course it can manage that, but how about we do totally random encodings..."
I think you are into something here.
I tried creating an emulator for CPU that is very well known but lacks working open source emulators.
Claude, Codex and Gemini were very good at starting something that looked great but all failed to reach a working product. They all ended up in a loop where fixing one issues caused something else to break and could never get out of it.