From: Paul Thacker
Sent: Friday, May 17, 2024 12:47 PM
To: ballyalley@groups.io
Subject: Typed in Floating Point Math (with help from ChatGPT)
 
OpenAI is rolling out its GPT-4o model, which is natively trained on audio and image data as well as text. I'd heard people extolling its ability to read text in images (their example was old handwritten documents), so I was curious how well it would do on BASIC code from newsletter scans. I was frustrated that I couldn't just upload a newsletter PDF because there was no text in it (they're really just images), but I was able to upload a screenshot of a program. It could read it reasonably well, and after some back and forth could basically follow the rules for the txt2prg format. I definitely needed to go over the results by hand. There were a few OCR errors and missed commas, and it had trouble getting the correct number of spaces. I'm not really sure whether or not I saved time in the end, but it was an interesting experiment.

Floating Point Math by Bill Templeton is a Bally BASIC only program from the Cursor newsletter. It can perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division on floating point numbers in the format XXX.XX.

Paul
