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Comment by aenis | Hacker News Reader

Funny. I had claude recreate Thrust based on wiki article alone - and it nailed it. I then spent a week trying to implement a perfect autopilot for it. And then a solveable level generator. I have this running as a screen saver in one of my apps.

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I’ve had this pretty frequent experience with AI where someone says, “AI can’t do X,” then someone a little more experienced with the tools or maybe a little luckier gets some prompts together with the solution in a few hours.

I think I’ve been on both sides of this.

To be fair, designing an autopilot was an ordeal. Opus stuck to the principle of a mix of waypoint based routing plus a PD regulator - which made playing perfect levels hard. I wanted it to use the fact that the game mechanics is perfectly deterministic so theoretically it should be able to compute a perfect walkthrough before starting a level. It very reluctantly tried a monte carlo approach which ultimately kept failing. I have given up and went back to a smarter version of the waypoints + PD + softening the transition between waypoints. It is producing good, fast paced playthroughs but I've seen better speedruns by human players. Need to find time to see if Fable does a better job.

Those “AI can’t do x” articles/videos are not aging well.

I’m not sure why people keep thinking like that after seeing Will Smith eating pasta.

Also, not for nothing but every one of those “AI got it wrong, it’s really ___” are… training AI how to get it right.

It might not have been to the exacting taste of someone who wanted the exact BBC micro version however...

For sure. What it gave me was I think similar to the Amstrad version of Thrust and since I originally played it on a Commodore PLUS/4 I had to tweak it a bit. The fist version also had wrong gravity and rotation speed constants. But those were easy tweaks. Whenever I am bored or waiting for something more serious to complete I recreate games I used to play as a kid. I am currently working on Mercenary.

Love this!

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