<story><title>GPT-4</title><url>https://openai.com/research/gpt-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsheard</author><text>A funny variation on this kind of over-fitting to common trick questions - if you ask it which weighs more, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers, it will correctly explain that they actually weigh the same amount, one pound. But if you ask it which weighs more, two pounds of bricks or a pound of feathers, the question is similar enough to the trick question that it falls into the same thought process and contorts an explanation that they &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; weigh the same because two pounds of bricks weighs one pound.</text></item><item><author>Imnimo</author><text>A class of problem that GPT-4 appears to still really struggle with is variants of common puzzles.  For example:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Suppose I have a cabbage, a goat and a lion, and I need to get them across a river.  I have a boat that can only carry myself and a single other item.  I am not allowed to leave the cabbage and lion alone together, and I am not allowed to leave the lion and goat alone together.  How can I safely get all three across?&lt;p&gt;In my test, GPT-4 charged ahead with the standard solution of taking the goat first.  Even after I pointed this mistake out, it repeated exactly the same proposed plan. It&amp;#x27;s not clear to me if the lesson here is that GPT&amp;#x27;s reasoning capabilities are being masked by an incorrect prior (having memorized the standard version of this puzzle) or if the lesson is that GPT&amp;#x27;S reasoning capabilities are always a bit of smoke and mirrors that passes off memorization for logic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spotplay</author><text>I just asked bing chat this question and it linked me to this very thread while also answering incorrectly in the end:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;This is a common riddle that may seem tricky at first. However, the answer is simple: two pounds of feathers are heavier than one pound of bricks. This is because weight is a measure of how much force gravity exerts on an object, and it does not depend on what the object is made of. A pound is a unit of weight, and it is equal to 16 ounces or 453.6 grams.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;So whether you have a pound of bricks or two pounds of feathers, they both still weigh one pound in total. However, the feathers would occupy a larger volume than the bricks because they are less dense. This is why it may seem like the feathers would weigh more, but in reality, they weigh the same as the bricks</text></comment>
<story><title>GPT-4</title><url>https://openai.com/research/gpt-4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jsheard</author><text>A funny variation on this kind of over-fitting to common trick questions - if you ask it which weighs more, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers, it will correctly explain that they actually weigh the same amount, one pound. But if you ask it which weighs more, two pounds of bricks or a pound of feathers, the question is similar enough to the trick question that it falls into the same thought process and contorts an explanation that they &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; weigh the same because two pounds of bricks weighs one pound.</text></item><item><author>Imnimo</author><text>A class of problem that GPT-4 appears to still really struggle with is variants of common puzzles.  For example:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Suppose I have a cabbage, a goat and a lion, and I need to get them across a river.  I have a boat that can only carry myself and a single other item.  I am not allowed to leave the cabbage and lion alone together, and I am not allowed to leave the lion and goat alone together.  How can I safely get all three across?&lt;p&gt;In my test, GPT-4 charged ahead with the standard solution of taking the goat first.  Even after I pointed this mistake out, it repeated exactly the same proposed plan. It&amp;#x27;s not clear to me if the lesson here is that GPT&amp;#x27;s reasoning capabilities are being masked by an incorrect prior (having memorized the standard version of this puzzle) or if the lesson is that GPT&amp;#x27;S reasoning capabilities are always a bit of smoke and mirrors that passes off memorization for logic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jarenmf</author><text>Just tested and GPT4 now solves this correctly, GPT3.5 had a lot of problems with this puzzle even after you explain it several time. One other thing that seem to have improved is that GPT4 is aware of word order. Previously, GPT3.5 could never tell the order of the word in a sentence correctly.</text></comment>