2 ms·
> But the code in WIN87EM.DLL looks very much like the result of changes made in desperation until it worked somehow, even though the changes made little or no
by Izkata 3y ago
> But the code in WIN87EM.DLL looks very much like the result of changes made in desperation until it worked somehow, even though the changes made little or no sense.
This is how the characters in Coding Machines realized something was up, assembly instructions involving carry bits that made no sense, that they later realized was how an AI writes code: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
> It took us the rest of the afternoon to pick through the convoluted jump targets and decode four consecutive instructions. That snippet, it turns out, was finding the sign of an integer. Anyone else would have done a simple comparison and a jump to set the output register to -1, 0, or 1, but the four instructions were a mess of instructions that all either set the carry bit as a side-effect, or used it in an unorthodox way.
- Terr_ 3y agoThat reminds me of a case where an evolutionary-algorithm was being applied to FPGA circuits ("programmable" circuit layouts) with the goal of detecting the presence or absence of a particular tone. [0] One of the results was a bizarre circuit that wasn't really digital anymore, because the pieces were arranged to exploit ways in which the digital circuit was imperfect, forming a system that was actually analog and idiosyncratic to the test environment. [0] https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/