Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia

A German magazine (c't) ran a Asteroids programming contest in 2008 - create a client with access to the emulator output of the game that provides keyboard inputs to control the game.

The highest scoring submission that won the contest had a high score of around 137k. Last week, I had GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna implement and hill-climb on this task, as I wanted to see how big the difference in smartness is. Luna implemented something, but never exceeded ca. 20k points, with a large variance. Sol got something in the area of the humans implementation.

Astra, which finished fastest, had a highscore of around 1.7Mm when the game seemed to fairly reliably crash. On the way, it disassembled parts of the ROM to extract information about the game.

I didn't do a ton work to document and measure the specifics, but it was very impressive.

I am going to try to build the original Prince of Persia using Swift as it is the best language for building a macOS game. Being a classic 2D cinematic platformer, Apple's native frameworks provide exactly what I need without the overhead of a massive cross-platform engine, and I love simplicity

So here goes my weekend, flag this and get a life

Off tangent but the latest prince of Persia game is really fun

The prompts provided are atrocious. It's amazing that the LLMs actually built something useful.

> My first prompt was simple: "in this original code there 6502 assembly code for prince of persia, use the save level files and try to do it in c# console."

Do what in the what now in the console?

when the author mentioned playing prince of persia on a pc-xt, i assumed this was some kind of ai-generated nonsense

but no

they actually did port the game to the lowest-end hardware available in 1989. you could actually play prince of persia on an 8088 with a cga card!

Just one thing you could do is not drag Prince of Persia into this.

Please.

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