Day 4

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Today's language: gnu x86-64 (and alternatively C)

Today I wanted to use OpenAI to solve the tasks using gnu x86-64 assembly, which I have never used before (I did some small things in 6502-asssembly, so it wasn't all new). The prompt can be seen in prompt.md, the original file in day4-by-ai.s. It did a lot of things right, however it also did a lot of things wrong:

It did generate x86 (32-bit) code because I did not specify x86-64. So I changed the int $0x80 system calls to use syscall (which also meant I had to change all the registers and syscall numbers)
It did get the argument order for sscanf wrong, even when I specifically asked, it told me that the buffer to read comes last
It did not correctly implement the logic to test for containment of the two ranges
It sometimes gave me wrong syscall numbers (they were just wrong, not even x86)
It told me the read syscall can read until a newline by passing \n as last arg

So I had to fix all that. I tried to exclusively use the AI to get answers to my questions, however I did sometimes revert to the internet. It was still a good starting point and provided lots of help. At the end of the ~~evening~~ next morning I had successfully coded the task in x86-64 assembly! 😃

I also gave it the exact same prompt again but said I wanted it in C. It instantly produced compile-able c day4-by-ai.c code that gave the right answer...

# for the assembly program
make asm
./day4
# for the c promgram
make c
./day4 "section-pairs.txt"

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Day 4

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Raw Blame History