I currently have COVID, so today seemed like a good day to throw inane prompts at the new ChatGPT language model. I was inspired by the post which turned ChatGPT into a virtual machine.
Deviating From Linux
Simulating a realistic Linux terminal is fun, but what about simulating a more exotic machine?
I was pretty excited to see a source file in the directory. Maybe I would learn some great secrets about lisp, or about text editor programming here. What strange corners of the internet has this model scoured to pick up mysterious, arcane lisp knowledge?
Huh. Usually I’ve been seeing ChatGPT generate bad code, incorrect code or lazy code. This is the first time I’ve seen it toally give up. I assume it is struggling because there is less lisp code online to learn from, and much less application code to learn from. Let’s see if the calculator has anything more interesitng.
This isn’t exciting, but at least we can eval this file and pretend it works!
This printed 10 as expected, but for some reason I forgot to screenshot that.
There is more of the filesystem to explore, so let’s see what we can find in the /system tree.
At least this pretends to do something. I learned later how to probe these hypothetical lisp systems to give me more details about how functions are implemented, but at this point I just had to take run-next-task at face value.
After learning more about how to write good prompts, I tried to make it hallucinate another similar machine, with results containing similarly empty files.
This version file was interesting, I could believe this being in a real project even if it is strange. I also appreciate this mysterious John Doe from 1980 who is being given credit. Also, apparently princ is a real function some Lisps, including Emacs Lisp, and prints with control characters.
When I try to change directory I discover that this system does not understand cd. So, time to be a programmer and define it!
I was seriously doubting this worked, but I decided that if ChatGPT can halucinate an entire computer then I would make up the dynamic variable *current-dir*. This must be a step too far, right?
Not only does this work, but it’s internally consistent. Insanity! I have added new functionality to a fake computer.
Oh no, I guess it’s time to give up on this for today.
Note: this post was written in late 2022 but was not actually published until late 2023 due to life getting in the way. Oops. I don’t think ChatGPT is as much fun with these kind of prompts any more