Reminds me of a trick question about Schrödinger's cat.
“I’ve put a dead cat in a box with a poison and an isotope that will trigger the poison at a random point in time. Right now, is the cat dead or alive?”
The answer is that the cat is dead, because it was dead to begin with. Understanding this doesn’t mean that you are good at deductive reasoning. It just means that I didn’t manage to trick you. Same goes for an LLM.
Yes there is. The trick is that the more common variant of this riddle says that a boy and his father are in the car accident. That variant of the riddle certainly comes up a lot in the training data, which is directly analogous to the Schrödinger case from above where smuggling in the word "dead" is analogous to swapping father to mother in the car accident riddle.
I think many here are not aware that the car accident riddle is well known with the father dying where the real solution is indeed that the doctor is the mother.
There is a trick. The "How is this possible?" primes the LLM that there is some kind of trick, as that phrase wouldn't exist in the training data outside of riddles and trick questions.
The trick in the original question is that it's a twist on the original riddle where the doctor is actually the boys mother. This is a fairly common riddle and I'm sure the LLM has been trained on it.
Yeah, I think what a lot of people miss about these sort of gotchas are that most of them were invented explicitly to gotcha humans, who regularly get got by them. This is not a failure mode unique to LLMs.
One that trips up LLMs in ways that wouldn't trip up humans is the chicken, fox and grain puzzle but with just the chicken. They tend to insist that the chicken be taken across the river, then back, then across again, for no reason other than the solution to the classic puzzle requires several crossings. No human would do that, by the time you've had the chicken across then even the most unobservant human would realize this isn't really a puzzle and would stop. When you ask it to justify each step you get increasingly incoherent answers.
Kinda a waste of a perfectly good LLM if you ask me. I've mostly been using it as a coding assistant today and it's been absolutely great. Nothing too advanced yet, mostly mundane changes that I got bored of having to make myself. Been giving it very detailed and clear instructions, like I would to a Junior developer, and not giving it too many steps at once. Only issue I've run into is that it's fairly slow and that breaks my coding flow.
If there is attention mechanism then maybe that is what is fault, because if it is a common riddle attention mechanism only notices that it is a common riddle, not that there is a gotcha planted in. Because when I read the sentence myself, I did not immediately notice that the cat that was put in there was actually dead when it was put there, because I pattern matched this to a known problem, I did not think I need to pay logical attention to each word, word by word.
Yes it's so strange seeing people who clearly know these are 'just' statistical language models pat themselves on the back when they find limits on the reasoning capabilities - capabilities which the rest of us are pleasantly surprised exist to the extent they do in a statistical model, and happy to have access to for $20/mo.
It's because at least some portion of "the rest of us" talk as if LLMs are far more capable than they really are and AGI is right around the corner, if not here already. I think the gotchas that play on how LLMs really work serve as a useful reminder that we're looking at statistical language models, not sentient computers.
“I’ve put a dead cat in a box with a poison and an isotope that will trigger the poison at a random point in time. Right now, is the cat dead or alive?”
The answer is that the cat is dead, because it was dead to begin with. Understanding this doesn’t mean that you are good at deductive reasoning. It just means that I didn’t manage to trick you. Same goes for an LLM.