4 ms·
I remember reading this book in the early 1980s (it was in my school library and was outdated even then) when I had a home computer that I programmed in BASIC a
by jhbadger 4y ago
I remember reading this book in the early 1980s (it was in my school library and was outdated even then) when I had a home computer that I programmed in BASIC and laughed at it, because "That's not how computers work! You can't just ask them questions and have them give you the answer! You have to write a program to solve each problem!". But like the article mentions, this is quite similar to the way LLMs like ChatGPT work. And it even anticipated the problem that such chatbots may cause -- students using them to do their homework and not learning the material themselves.
- bitwize 4y agoI really liked the story when I read it. The computer was invented by an eccentric genius scientist character in a sci-fi setting, so its unrealism didn't matter, as I knew computers might be like that someday. And now here we are!
- mjd 4y agoMy recollection of the plot is that Danny, Joe, and Irene had to solve all the problems themselves and store the answers for later retrieval. And nobody in the book seemed to think that this wasn't cheating.
- jhbadger 4y agoIt was actually kind of vague as to what they did -- they talked about "feeding the textbook to the computer" which may have implied some sort of programming/presolving problems, but later they could literally (as in using voice) ask the computer to solve a math "word problem" and it could.