On 04/01/2021 11:00, gareth evans wrote:
> Thinking back to my first job, nearly 50 years ago now,
> when I had to dis-assemble DEC's paper tape BASIC
> interpreter in order to enhance it, I guess that
> dis-assemblers and decompilers must now be ten-a-penny,
> especially for programs running under Windows where
> the structure of Windows programs is well-known with
> an assumption that C was the source language?

Modern compilers of any language output a structured executable file,
such as Portable Execution format for Windows and ELF for Linux.

> But I wonder if Artificial Intelligence could, after
> being fed with numerous instruction sets, take a
> block of binary, and analyse its source without
> any prior knowledge of the instruction set?

That's two separate problems. The first is taking any block of binary
and identifying if it contains an executable format of a particular
processor architecture and OS.

The second is taking a known executable format, turning it in to a human
readable form, such as a high level language - which doesn't have to be
the same language it was written in.

> I am particularly interested in the Binary Blob
> provided for Raspberry Pi computers, with a view to
> getting detailed knowledge of the video processors
> employed therein.

That's a third problem. No matter how good your program is that
identified and produces pseudo-source code, it needs someone to put in a
huge amount of work to interpret and document the driver creating
certain structures in memory and poking values in to registers.

---druck

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05