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

criemen•about 1 hour ago

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•40 minutes ago

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

Kuyawa•31 minutes ago

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

andsoitis•13 minutes ago

Share it when you're done! Even if it isn't complete complete.

rhipitr•about 1 hour ago

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

pawelduda•38 minutes ago

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

Kuyawa•37 minutes ago

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

That looks really amazing

dofm•18 minutes ago

It looks like one of those spam shooty game ads you get between Youtube Shorts.

Prince of Persia is a piece of contemplative, subtle, beautifully, artistically minimal motion puzzle art. God knows what that is.

smokel•about 1 hour ago

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?

daemonologist•6 minutes ago

Yeah, I'm thinking the nigh-unreadable AI-speak we get these days makes a lot more sense if this is what they're training on. Or maybe the author has translated the prompts from another language?

gcanyon•about 1 hour ago

"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.

cavemandaveman•19 minutes ago

Or having another model proofread the prompts and write clearer instructions

koala_man•27 minutes ago

Unsurprisingly it was buggy without the obligatory "Make no mistakes."

dofm•19 minutes ago

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

Please.

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

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