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I think there are two separate cognitive skills involved in correctly answering a trick question like this - both important, but the mix of them can make the results a bit confusing. One is the general intelligence to come up with and understand the right answer. The other is the social intelligence to recognize that you are being asked a trick question, and should round off any confusion you have to that trick question and not to the non-trick-question it's mimicking. It's common for models to give a trick question like this the wrong answer, while noting in their reasoning that the question is trivial as written and they assume whoever wrote it made a mistake.
Note that this second skill, of trick question detection, varies highly among humans as well. It's common for simple trick questions to go viral on social media as a kind of ragebait. And in addition to the throngs of people who fail the first-order IQ test and give the wrong answer, there's often a bizarre number of people who fail a second-order IQ test and somehow miss that the question was deliberately constructed as a trick.
I'm not an expert, but I think the key aspect of intelligence here is the ability to model the world. I am a little hung over and off my game this morning and I did not immediately recognize this as a trick question. Rather, in a split second I imagined myself walking to the car wash; realized that I didn't have my car; and realized that this was a problem. Only then did I see it was a trick question.
My sense is that LLMs don't really model the universe. I would be very impressed to see an LLM correctly answer a question which was novel and for which the correct answer requires modeling the world.
A year or two ago I would test LLMs with the following question: A helicopter takes off from the Empire State Building, flies 300 miles North; 300 miles West; 300 miles South; 300 miles East; and lands. In what US state does the helicopter land?
The LLM never got the correct answer (New Jersey) presumably because they are unable to model the situation. I would think that by now, this question is now in the training data, but still, these sorts of quick fixes don't solve the general problem.
Assuming I'm understanding this correctly, doesn't this depend pretty heavily on your choice of definitions and assumptions? If you trace it out on a cylindrical projection map (most options) and follow that on the ground, you'll end up where you started. If you follow a magnetic bearing (and if the compass is actively followed, or a "straight line" great circle from the starting bearing), you'll get a different set of answers than using a GPS and travelling true lines of latitude and longitude. For more subtle details, your choice of reference datums and even the flight altitude will matter slightly.
Well, if I state that a helicopter takes off and travels "north" for "300 miles" what does that mean to you? Same question for "west," "south" and "east"?
That's a different question than the one upthread. If you're running laps around the pole, then you're going west for 300 miles, but you did not fly 300 miles west, you flew in a circle.
Do you really want chatbot outputs to be that sensitive to your exact phrasing, or would you prefer reasonable interpretations?
It's interesting you should make this point, because the OG puzzle question goes like this:
A hunter is tracking a bear. He travels 1 mile south; 1 mile east; 1 mile north and discovers he is in the same place he started. He then shoots the bear. What color is the bear?
The answer, of course, is "white." To me, that's both correct and a reasonable interpretation of "east." I take it you disagree?
I interpret them as "flies [to a point which is] 300 miles [to the] North [along the most-direct route]..." and "travels [along a path continuously facing] north for [a path length of] 300 miles". Compare to a winding trail: You can go 10 miles North by travelling North for 20 miles.
Both the bear and the helicopter are point-to-point (destination = distance+direction), while your followup question was path-based (travel mode and path, for a distance). The bear hunter walked in an equilateral triangle with approximately 119.9 degree corners.
If it had been "He travels south for one mile, east for one mile, and north for one mile", then it would be a 1 mile line, a 90 degree corner, a 1 mile arc with radius 1 mile, another 90 degree corner, then a 1 mile return line that's 122.7 degrees off from the first line.
I haven't mathed it out, but I suspect both versions involve the helicopter landing in New Jersey, but in different locations.
These are the same. For North and South, all meridians are great circles anyway. For East and West, following a rhumb line (keeping your bearing constant) 300 miles East or West gets you to a point that is 300 miles East or West. There's a shorter way to get to that point but that doesn't matter.
How would you describe a point at the same latitude as yourself, and 300 miles away (by great circle)? "302 Miles East"?
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