There’s a few of these types of video floating around YouTube at the moment. I figured I’d join in and have a play. Can I tell ChatGPT to pretend to be a BBC Micro?
First I had to tell it to imagine being one. The trick is telling it to not tell you anything but what the execued code would do
Then I typed in the first program everyone does
So far it seems to be doing something correct looking. Let’s try a more complex piece of code
Ah right I see what it’s doing. It thinks I want to do that 10 times. Nope, the 10 is a line number. Can I tell it this?
Talking to ChatGPT is like talking to someone who takes everything you say very literally.
Hmm this isn’t quite what I mean. I meant multi-line instructions in separate chat text. Maybe it thinks I should do them all together…
Curious, it seems to kind of know what to do. Let’s give it a loop…
How very interesting, it seemed to recognise the loop was infinte and give up, showing “…” instead.
I’m not entirely convinced though, 10 PRINT is so common on the Internet as an example code even people who’ve never seen BASIC before can produce the output by purely guessing.
Let’s give it some BBC specific commands and a bit of inline assembler…
Well it did something, but it was’t correct… Can we train it?
Hmm probably not. Although, it’s not that it can’t assemble code, it’s more I can’t explain how to do it precisely enough using English.
That’s why programming languages exist at all. It’s much easier to speak to machines in their own language than attempt to twist English into a precise set of instructions.
