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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25669 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Computationally, maybe all we are is Markov chains. I'm not sold, but Markov chat bots have been around for a few decades now and used to fool people occasionally even at smaller scales.

LLMs can do pretty impressive things, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that any of them have stepped clearly outside the bounds of their training dataset. In part that's hard to evaluate because we've been training them on everything we can find. Can a LLM trained on purely pre-Einstein sources adequately discuss relativity? A human can be well versed in lots of things with substantially less training material.

I still don't think we have a good model for what intelligence is. Some have recently suggested "compression", which is interesting from an information theory perspective. But I won't be surprised to find that whatever it is, it's actually an NP-hard problem in the perfect case, and everything else is just heuristics and approximations trying to be close. In some ways it'd be amusing if it turns out to be a good application of quantum computing.

I don't want to speak on 'intelligence' or genuine reasoning or heuristics and approximations, but when it comes to going outside the bounds of their training data, it's pretty trivially possible to take an LLM and give a problem related to a video game (or a mod for a video game) that was well outside of its knowledge cutoff or training date.

I can't test this right now, it's definitely not an optimal solution (see uploaded file for comparison), and I think it misinterpreted the Evanition operator, but it's a question that I'm pretty sure didn't have an equivalent on the public web anywhere until today. There's something damning in getting a trivial computer science problem either non-optimal or wrong, especially when given the total documentation, but there's also something interesting in getting one like this close at all with such minimum of information.

/images/17544296446888535.webp

That is pretty impressive. Is it allowed to search the web? It looks like it might be. I think the canonical test I'm proposing would disallow that, but it is a useful step in general.

Huh. Uploading just the Patterns section of the HexBook webpage and disabling search on web looks better even on Grok3, though that's just a quick glance and I won't be able to test it for a bit.

EDIT: nope, several hallucinated patterns on Grok 3, including a number that break from the naming convention. And Grok4 can't have web search turned off. Bah.

Have you tried simply asking it not to search the web? The models usually comply when asked. If they don't, it should be evident from the UI.

That's a fair point, and does seem to work with Grok, as does just giving it only one web page and requesting it to not use others. Still struggles, though.

That said, a lot of the logic 'thinking' steps are things like "The summary suggests list operations exist, but they're not fully listed due to cutoff.", getting confused by how Consideration/Introspection works (as start/end escape characters) or trying to recommend Concat Distillation, which doesn't exist but is a reasonable (indeed, the code) name for Speaker's Distillation. So it's possible I'm more running into issues with the way I'm asking the question, such that Grok's research tooling is preventing it from seeing the necessary parts of the puzzle to find the answer.

I tried using o3, but it correctly noted that the file you mentioned isn't available, and its web browsing tool failed when trying to use the website.

I can't do anything about the missing document, but I did manually copy and paste most of the website. This is its answer:

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6892b68c0c3081919777d514df3ba8c2

That's a bit weird an approach -- you're drawing 20 Hermes Gambits rather than having the code recurse, and the Gemini Decomposition → Reveal → Novice's Gambit could be simplified to just Reveal -- but it does work and fulfills the requirement. Can run it in this IDE if anyone wants, though you'll have to use the simplified version since Novice's Gambit (and Bookkeeper's Gambit) isn't supported there, but the exactly-as-chatGPT'd version does work in-game (albeit an absolute pain to draw without a Focus).

That's kinda impressive. Both Rotation Gambit II and Retrospection are things I'd expect LLMs to struggle with.

Thanks for verifying the answer! If there's a takeaway here, I'm not sure why you're ?paying for Grok 4. Grok 3 was genuinely impressive, and somewhat noticeably better than the competition at launch. Not the case here I'm afraid.

With that aside, I'm not sure how other people see LLMs tackling problems of this complexity and then claim they're not reasoning. It bemuses me.

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