Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Closed source downloadable software is "dead" unless it doesn't require you to login to their servers at the start of the game and acts as a thin client.

These publishers will find a way to lock it down for new games and tie it to their servers to run it, or have the game streamed to you; simulated via a world model or not.

View on HN

You can still run it in a VM and access files on disk. Or if they're 1337 haxorz and keep the game in RAM you can still inspect RAM

There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui.

Like literally last night I did this to decompile an Android game whose APK on the Play Store is just a thin wrapper that downloads the real Unity game at runtime. It was a 30 second barrier

Screen-sharing, not code-sharing.

So then have the AI tool watch the screenshare for some amount of time and then recreate it entirely locally.

It's naive to think that you can enumerate all the interactions of complex software like a modern game purely by observation let alone over a network link. Anyway all you're proposing here is an even more rapid industry death.

> There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui.

This may be straightforward on Android, but is it on iOS?

"No way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile" seems less like a rule of nature than the way it happens to work now. I don't think it's extreme to imagine that likely a side effect of this AI-driven gold rush to "free the IP" will be the further lockdown of general purpose computing.

This won't matter. AI will be able to build the game from video of gameplay.

Without decompilation, it's impossible to say that you've experienced every aspect of a game. So AI will be able to build something that approximates part of the game from video of gameplay, but it will not be able to completely build the game with reliable consistency.

Streaming won't stop it, just have the AI play the game and do every possible thing.

Every possible thing! We can't even enumerate every possible thing in chess with a compact set of rules let alone every possible thing in something like Red Dead Redemption with unbounded complexity. "Thing" is not "what happens when you shoot an enemy". "Thing" is "what happens when you shoot this particular enemy in this particular place at this particular in-game time and this particular not-in-game time after doing this particular long sequence of other very particular things".

That's what the issue tracker is for. If someone notices a subtle difference and they want it added they'll file an issue. If nobody notices the untested space it doesn't matter.

Maybe we should start with something easy and clone Nethack by just playing it through..

Astra Max can do 12%: https://balrogai.com/

Though after improving the harness it can fare better, but still no completion: https://roger-creus.github.io/blog/astra-craftax-nethack/

If anybody's paycheck depends on "AI could never..." I suggest exploring other skills.

In general I agree, but in the context of this specific thread what you're saying is a mathematical impossibility. Now could you use pure observation to get the gist of a game and maybe even have AI fill in the rest with fun new details? Yes. And what you'd end up with is an approximation of the game missing some things and adding others, not a clone of it. But you can't use pure observation to form a complete solution of a game when there are more possible game states to enumerate than there are Planck times left until the heat death of the universe.

Good luck doing "every possible thing" in Minecraft or Factorio.

Hard to say if publishers are going to want to pay the (now increased) hardware costs to stream hosted games when before the AI boom they kept failing to get the idea of the ground. Certainly I don't think we'll see it happen unless the AI bubble pops reducing hardware demand for AI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com