Programming in Assembly Is Brutal, Beautiful, and Maybe Even a Path to Better AI

Roller coaster tycoon It wasn’t the hottest computer game of 1999. But if you look beneath the pixels — the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, people plundering food (and the doormen wiping their feet in their heels) — deep down at the code level, you see craftsmanship so obsessive that it verges on madness. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote everything in the compilation.

Some programming languages, such as Python, Go, or C++, are called “high-level” because they work sort of like human language, written with commands and jargon that might fit in a poetry slam. Generally, a program like a compiler converts this into what the machine actually reads: blocks of 1’s and 0’s (or perhaps hexadecimal) that tell the actual transistors how to behave. Assembly language, the lowest of the “low-level” languages, has close to one-to-one compatibility with the machine’s native language. It encodes directly to metal. Building a complex computer game from assembly is like weaving a tapestry from shed cat fur.

Why would anyone do this? I recently asked Sawyer, who lives in his native Scotland. Efficiency was one reason, he told me. In the 1990s, high-level programming tools were not entirely present. The compilers were very slow. Correctors sucked. Sawyer could have avoided it by doing his own work on x86 assembly, the lingua franca for Intel chips.

We both knew that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was love. Before turning to Rollercoaster, Sawyer wrote another game in the compilation, Transport pole. It puts players in charge of the city’s roads, railway stations, lanes and ports. I envisioned Sawyer as a model train hobbyist, laying every section of track, hand-stitching the artificial turf, every detail a choice and a chore. To move these carefully designed pixels from bitmaps to displays, Sawyer had to exploit the full potential of the chip. “Roller Coaster Tycoon It only happened because I was aware of the limits of what was possible.

Working within limits? Perhaps a strange idea in this age of digital abundance, that a single function call in an AI training algorithm could power a million GPUs. With compilation, you get one thing and one thing only, which is the thing you ask for, even as many programmers have learned the hard way, if it’s wrong. The assembly is brutal and beautiful that way. It requires you to say exactly what you mean.

I’ve done the assembly Harmful creators. They wanted things to be easier, not harder. I imagine they’re tired of loading up punch cards and flipping switches on their giant steampunk beasts. Maybe they dreamed of a world like ours, where computers could do a lot with minimal guidance.