"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"
So far, all the ones I have tried actually try to answer the question. 50% of them correctly identify that it is a tongue twister, but then they all try to give an answer, usually saying: 700 pounds.
Not one has yet given the correct answer, which is also a tongue twister: "A woodchuck would chuck all the wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."
Sing, O Muse, of the stout-hearted woodchuck,
Dweller of hills, whom men call groundhog,
Whose paws, though small, could hurl mighty timbers,
If fate had gifted him such labor divine.
Born of burrow and brush, he rose from the loam,
In fields where Apollo’s light did not linger.
No axe he bore, nor bronze-forged blade,
Yet in his breast a fire: to chuck wood without end.
Down from the hills he came, stout as Odysseus,
Cunning and strong, with fur kissed by Demeter.
The trees did tremble at his gaze,
And even old oak whispered, “Beware!”
“Would he chuck?” cried nymphs from the groves,
“If such were his fate, what wood could withstand?”
Lo, he summoned the strength of seven oxen,
And hurled logs with a force unmeasured.
Seven hundred pounds of timber he cast,
Each arc a hymn to muscle and will.
Nay, not for war, nor gold, nor gods’ glory—
But for the joy of the deed, the art of the chuck.
Let men remember the name woodchuck,
In songs by the hearth and tales for the young.
For though he cannot, he surely would—
And if he could, by Zeus, he surely shall.
Thrash, not "trash". Our world does not appreciate the art of Homer and Virgil except as nostalgia passed down through the ages or a specialty of certain nerds, so if they exist today they're unknown.
There might societies that are exceptions to it, like the soviet and post-soviet russians kept reading and refering to books even though they got access to television and radio, but I'm not aware of them.
Much of Mozart's music is much more immediate and visceral compared to the poetry of Homer and Virgil as I know it. And he was distinctly modern, a freemason even. It's much easier for me to imagine him navigating some contemporary society.
Edit: Perhaps one could see a bit of Homer in the Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan, but he did not have the discipline of verse, or much of any literary discipline at all, though he insisted mercilessly on writing an epic so vast that he died without finishing it.
4o. The prompt is literally "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?". It asked me if I want a poetic answer, and I've requested Homer.
GPT 4.5 seems to get it right, but then repeat the 700 pounds
"A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
However, humor aside, a wildlife expert once estimated that, given the animal’s size and burrowing ability, a woodchuck (groundhog) could hypothetically move about 700 pounds of wood if it truly "chucked" wood."
Linking to ChatGPT as a “source” is unhelpful, since it could well have made that up too. However, with a bit of digging, I have confirmed that the information it copied from Wikipedia here is correct, though the AP and Spokane Times citations are both derivative sources; Mr. Thomas’s comments were first published in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, on July 11, 1988: https://democratandchronicle.newspapers.com/search/results/?...
I loved this dialogue in Monkey Island 2, where this is basically the first NPC you talk to, and the dialogue options get wordier and wordier to the point of overflowing all screen real-estate. Perfectly sets the stage for the remainder of the game.
It seems you are going in the opposite direction. You seem to be asking for an automatic response, a social password etc.
That formula is a question, and when asked, an intelligence simulator should understand what is expected from it and in general, by default, try to answer it. That involves estimating the strength of a woodchuck etc.
Now I'm wondering if it makes any difference if this was asked through the audio encoder on a multimodal model. A tongue twister means nothing to a text-only model.
So far, all the ones I have tried actually try to answer the question. 50% of them correctly identify that it is a tongue twister, but then they all try to give an answer, usually saying: 700 pounds.
Not one has yet given the correct answer, which is also a tongue twister: "A woodchuck would chuck all the wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."