Now I'm wondering: could a monkey hitting random keys on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time eventually come up with the right prompts to get GPT-4 to produce code that compiles to a faithful reproduction of Doom?
Probably more easily than you'd think. DOOM is open source[1], and as GP alludes, is probably the most frequently ported game in existence, so its source code almost certainly appears multiple times in GPT-4's training set, likely alongside multiple annotated explanations.
Well, not the most ported, the Z-Machine with tons of games (even ones legally available from IF archive with great programming, such as Curses!, Jigsaw, Anchorhead) might be. It runs even on the Game Boy, up to v3 games.
Z5 and Z8 games will run fine from a 68020 and beyond.
Now I'm wondering: if there were two monkeys hitting random keys on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time, one in the gpt-4 prompt and another straight typing 0s and 1s who would produce Doom code faster?
No, because GPT-4 has finite memory, its context length, and its random number generator for output selection is probably pseudo-random with finite memory.
If the random number generator is pseudo-random, this makes GPT-4 a deterministic finite-state machine, and the output sequence does not necessarily contain all possible subsequences no matter how many times the monkey types a new random key. Put differently, some output subsequences may be inaccessible no matter which keys are input. Same if the random number generator is truly random but its value cannot select among all possible output tokens, only a subset provided by the GPT at each step.
