Videos showing characters and elements from different games merged together have recently spread across social media. Examples include Minecraft’s Steve blowing up a Grand Theft Auto V road with TNT or fighting Skyrim bosses with a diamond sword. These projects are often presented as evidence that artificial intelligence can now decompile one game and combine it with another.
Flavien Normand, director of Teamcraft Studios, cautions that AI has not created the basic technique. For nearly a decade, he has worked in reverse engineering, a discipline focused on examining software or games to understand how they operate.
The process begins with compilation. A game’s human-readable source code is compressed and optimized so that a machine can process it. Decompilation works in the opposite direction: it attempts to rewrite or translate that compressed file into code that humans can more easily read and understand.
According to the available material, AI is transforming the speed and accessibility of work that enthusiast communities have been carrying out for years. Those communities have sought to decipher and reproduce parts of games in order to reinvent them or make them run on other machines. The technology is therefore accelerating existing practices rather than introducing the concept of reverse engineering itself.
Sources: Le Monde Économie.