The first programs were written in binary/hexadecimal, and only later did we invent coding languages to convert between human readable code and binary machine code.
So why can’t we just do the same thing in reverse? I hear a lot about devices from audio streaming to footware rendered useless by abandonware. Couldn’t a very smart person (or AI) just take the existing program and turn it into code?
It’s easy to say that we should throw AI at a problem and in a few years it will solve it, but most of the time it doesn’t actually work that way. If you think about the Turing Test itself, where the history goes back to the 1950s, how many decades did it take for us to get to anything that could reasonably come close to passing it? So anytime you think to yourself that one of these days AI is going to get there, remember that one of these days might actually be a half century from now.
The other aspect to this challenge, or rather specifically with regards to this challenge, is that the setup involves humans organizing code in a certain way according to some kind of reasoning that the authors know about, and then that being compiled away, and then another computer program trying to get back what the original authors might have been thinking when they designed the thing originally. That’s a steep hill to climb. Can it be done on a small scale? It certainly can. On a large scale? Don’t hold your breath.