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

17 points msephton 19 hours ago 9 comments

smokel 52 minutes ago | parent

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?

gcanyon 47 minutes ago | parent

"now char coming but movement everything wrong ... prince is not in floor"

I'm assuming a language barrier on the part of the author. I wonder if the models would do better being prompted in the author's main language.

criemen 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

looperhacks 17 minutes ago | parent

If I remember correctly, back then all "good" entries in the contest solved the game by syncing with the RNG and could basically predict where and how new asteroids would spawn. The difference between entries was planning ahead movement and residence against control issues due to the contest setup (like inputs getting delayed). I wonder how Astra managed so much better, I thought the problem was already solved

rhipitr 34 minutes ago | parent

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

pawelduda 15 minutes ago | parent

I played The Lost Crown and it's top tier, I assume you're talking about The Rogue?

Kuyawa 14 minutes ago | parent

The Lost Crown? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4vaxKwZ5rQ

That looks really amazing

Kuyawa 7 minutes ago | parent

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