ChatGPT as an Assembly Language Interpreter for Computing Education

ChatGPT as an Assembly Language Interpreter for Computing Education

연구 분야: Safety

학회: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Volume 40, Issue 2

Assembly language is a low-level programming language useful for a number of important computing areas, such as hardware and embedded systems programming, computer architecture, reverse engineering, and malware analysis. In recent years, generative AI, enhanced by GPT technology, has been widely adopted in the IT industry as well as computing education. However, little work has been done to investigate the applicability of GPT to teaching assembly language. In this paper, we fill in the gap by providing an empirical study of GPT's ability to interpret assembly instructions. In particular, we manually evaluated GPT-4's per-instruction explanations of code segments for four different computer architectures, namely x86, x86-64, ARM, and AArch64. Our study shows that, while inconsistencies and rare errors do exist, GPT's interpretations are highly accurate in general, demonstrating a great potential for such tools to be applied in pedagogical practices for tutoring assembly language.