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Comment by maginx | Hacker News Reader

In two places the article states that the original game had the ability to save the updated tree ("it had the ability to save progress and load it during the next run" and "It is an amazing example... of how, even with such a simple language, ... and the ability to save new questions").

The later part says the opposite - that the original implementation had "No ability to save progress" and that this is new in the C++ implementation.

I can't help but wonder (also due to other language features) if the author ran the article through an AI to 'tidy up' before posting... because I've often found ChatGPT etc. to introduce changes in meaning like this, rather than just rewriting. This is not to dismiss either the article or the power of LLM's, just a curious observation :)

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True. For example, the Apple ][+ came with a demo disk full of programs for the then-new Applesoft BASIC language, and this was one of them. The questions were saved by POKEing them into arrays hard-coded into the program, allowing you to SAVE the modified program after running it.

It seemed like a neat trick at the time. There was also a crude CRUD database that worked the same way, retaining up to 50 names and phone numbers.

Actually that disk had a lot of really cool programs, now that I think about it. A biorhythm plotter, Woz's "Little Brick Out" Breakout clone, and a few other demos by luminaries like Bruce Tognazzini and Bob Bishop. And of course, ELIZA, the mother of all LLMs... only it was called FREUD for some reason.

I believe that the intention was to say "No ability to save progress _between sessions_" in the original program, whereas the C++ implementation saves to text files.

Another portion of the article says more explicitly:

  Limitations:
    Maximum number of nodes: 200.
    The structure is stored only in memory (no disk saving).

I don't think so. Consider "It didn’t just attempt to guess the chosen animal but also learned from its mistakes, adding new questions and answers to its knowledge base. What’s more, it had the ability to save progress and load it during the next run.". Data persistence across trials is already implied by the first sentence, so what would the next "What's more, ..." part refer to - it mentions "saving" and "loading"? Even if we grant "saving" to mean updating the in-memory data structure, what would "loading" refer to? Also note the later "No ability to save progress" which directly contradicts "It had the ability to save progress". These sentences, both clearly referring to the original, are in direct contraction with each other and use the exact same terms. Inspection of the code shows that it clearly only saves the memory and not to disk.

Further suggested by the imagery used being AI generated

Yes the whole tone of voice is typical of LLM's as well.

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