2 ms·

I sort of understand the knee-jerk reactions to this. Hacker News is for humans, not robots, and there was an annoying trend of commenters posting LLM-generated

I sort of understand the knee-jerk reactions to this. Hacker News is for humans, not robots, and there was an annoying trend of commenters posting LLM-generated summaries of articles, which deserve to get flagged off the page until they stop. But I find it noteworthy, and in fact impressive, that ChatGPT can de-obfuscate and discern the meaning of this code. Letting the rest of us know that is a worthy contribution to the discussion. I would suggest leading with a clear statement of why you're posting chatbot output, though. Folks around here have an allergy to that sort of thing for a reason.

EmberTwin 3y ago
ChatGPT is not de-obfuscating this code. For one thing: > basic cellular automaton algorithm is completely wrong. A cellular automaton is a standard approach to level-generation in a roguelike, but this code implements a different approach, the rooms-and-corridors one. Another issue here is that ChatGPT is using a few key context clues to make its (incorrect but plausible) guess. Robert Nystrom, aka munificient, is well-known in the roguelikedev community for his game programming tutorials. I confirmed that ChatGPT knows who he is by asking "Who is @munificentbob and what is he known for?" The name of the function, "cave", that carves rooms makes it clear that this is some kind of level-generation algorithm - in fact, that's probably where the incorrect guess about cellular automata came from, because those algorithms are often used for "caves" (versus "dungeons" made with rooms-and-corridors). The characters printed are also roguelike standards. If I remove @munificient's name and rename "cave" to "X", ChatGPT's output is worse. It says: "This code is a compact implementation of a simple game where characters move around a grid.", which is...vaguely in the ballpark.

2 ms·

I sort of understand the knee-jerk reactions to this. Hacker News is for humans, not robots, and there was an annoying trend of commenters posting LLM-generated

by samatman 3y ago

EmberTwin 3y ago
ChatGPT is not de-obfuscating this code. For one thing: > basic cellular automaton algorithm is completely wrong. A cellular automaton is a standard approach to level-generation in a roguelike, but this code implements a different approach, the rooms-and-corridors one. Another issue here is that ChatGPT is using a few key context clues to make its (incorrect but plausible) guess. Robert Nystrom, aka munificient, is well-known in the roguelikedev community for his game programming tutorials. I confirmed that ChatGPT knows who he is by asking "Who is @munificentbob and what is he known for?" The name of the function, "cave", that carves rooms makes it clear that this is some kind of level-generation algorithm - in fact, that's probably where the incorrect guess about cellular automata came from, because those algorithms are often used for "caves" (versus "dungeons" made with rooms-and-corridors). The characters printed are also roguelike standards. If I remove @munificient's name and rename "cave" to "X", ChatGPT's output is worse. It says: "This code is a compact implementation of a simple game where characters move around a grid.", which is...vaguely in the ballpark.