AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
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Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#2I'd be interested in seeing the "slop" version for comparison.
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#3> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly.
Complaining about slop with slop.
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#4> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly. Complaining about slop with slop.
I was about to complain at you for jumping to conclusions, but your cited example contains two emdashes and a nested "it's not X it's Y". It certainly looks like slop. In my own writing I'm increasingly conscious of trying to avoid the appearance of slop, I would like to think I would have caught this.
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#5Hmm - the article isn't dated and it doesn't mention which models were used for the initial slop version. The initial commit in the git repo is from Feb 15, 2026.
I wonder how the initial pass would fare now with Fable 5 or 5.6 Sol?
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#6I tried to use his writeup to oneshot the game and you can see my results here along with the prompts I used:
https://kemendo.com/thrust-one-shot.html
Notably while the game "works" it's not even close to an a "reproduction" as far as I can tell - moreso an interpretation.
This has one level that doesn't level increment, none of the adversarial sprites are correct and the color and iconography are incorrect.
Granted I didn't give it much to work with but I figured I'd see what happens. As far as one shots go, I've seen worse.
I used commodity GPT 5.6 HIGH on firefox via chat interface
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#7> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly. Complaining about slop with slop.
A lot of people don't hate slop, they hate other people's slop. Of course their slop doesn't stink, they prompted it better or something.
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#8[deleted]
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#9> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly. Complaining about slop with slop.
> The tick loop waits at least 3 centiseconds per frame, giving an effective rate of about 33.33 Hz
3 centiseconds instead of 30 miliseconds, totally not a robot
Re: AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)
#10Funny. 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.