Machine Heart

Apr 14, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Training a Transformer on a 1970s PDP‑11 Takes Only 5.5 Minutes

A developer recreated a 1970s PDP‑11 environment, wrote a single‑layer, single‑head Transformer in assembly, and trained it on a sequence‑reversal task, achieving 100% accuracy after about 350 steps and a total training time of roughly 5.5 minutes.