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I have a little weather station mounted outside my house, and there is a small linux machine (Raspberry Pi) logging the weather data into an SQLite database.

I have a little weather station mounted outside my house, and there is a small linux machine (Raspberry Pi) logging the weather data into an SQLite database. I have almost two years of data now, so I asked GPT-4 to write a Python program that would query the database, calculate the average temperature for each day, fit a sine wave to those data points, find the first minimum of the sine wave and use that to calculate what day of the year should be coldest on average, then plot everything. It did that easily. But the big surprise was this: just for fun, I told GPT-4 that one of the quantities it had calculated could be used to estimate the orbital period of the Earth, and I asked it which quantity it was. It correctly answered that the reciprocal of the frequency of the fitted sine wave is an estimate of the Earth's orbital period. All I had told it to do was pull out the temperature data for each day, and fit a sine wave. It knew that the reciprocal of the frequency was the Earth's orbital period, without me mentioning anything at all about the Earth when I was prompting it to write the program. It had calculated dozens of variable values on its way to producing the plots, and it knew the right one to pick, and it knew the answer was its reciprocal. I thought that perhaps the program just recognized that the only value that could be used to calculate any period was that frequency, and perhaps the model didn't really know anything about the Earth motion through its orbit affecting the average temperature, so I asked: "Can any of the values be used to estimate the Moon's orbital period?" and it replied: "No, the code and the data used in this program are not suitable for estimating the Moon's orbital period. The temperature data being analyzed is influenced by the Earth's rotation around the Sun and other factors like weather patterns, but it doesn't directly correlate with the Moon's orbital period."

somenameforme 4y ago
It's a word prediction algorithm. Literally any collection of words (sometimes also known as a fact) it was trained on, regardless of how esoteric or domain specific, should generally be able to be regurgitated and, to a lesser degree, associated with similar collections of words. If you want to see it fail, don't try to "outsmart" it, but simply consider how it's programmed. --- Me: "continue the sequence: 0, done, 2, free, 4, hive" ChatGPT 4: "1, sun, 3, tree, 5, drive" Me: "that's wrong, try again" ChatGPT 4: "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive, 6, picks, 8, gate" Me: "that's wrong, try again" ChatGPT 4: 'I give up.' (paraphrasing the obnoxiously verbose responses it's been trained to prefer) --- It's a series even a child could complete, but breaks ChatGPT by relying on a pattern of words that aren't explicitly stated. So you get software which can pass the bar, but fail at trivial series.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  > It's a series even a child could complete Some children, perhaps; but your puzzle stumped this middle-aged engineer.
  - DougN7 4y ago
    You’re not alone - I had to read it out loud to see the pattern :)
    - marssaxman 4y ago
      I wonder if people have a range of sensitivity to what one might call the "mind's voice" - by analogy to the recent discovery of aphantasia, which revealed that different people's experience of the "mind's eye" ranges from vivid imagery to nothing at all.
      - jlokier 4y ago
        Some people say they don't have a mind voice, and grow up thinking nobody does. Other people, with a mind voice, grow up thinking everyone does. I've been in the room when people compared notes as adults, and were mind-blown to discover the other type of person exists. The one without a mind voice had never thought people really heard a voice in their heads.
  - d0mine 4y ago
    Each additional university math course makes the puzzle harder ;) Continue sequence: one, 1, two, 1, three, 2, four, 1,
- kirab 4y ago
  ChatGPT is not good when it needs to answer directly. If you let it lead itself to the right answer it's pretty good. # Kira I found this sequence: "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive" Reason step-by-step about the pattern. Consecutively continue the sequence with four more entries. Consecutively reflect on your answer and fix mistakes in case you broke the pattern. # ChatGPT4 After examining the given sequence, "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive", we can notice an interesting pattern. It appears that the sequence alternates between numbers and words that sound like numbers. Let's break down the pattern: "0" is a number. "done" sounds like the number "1" when spoken aloud. "2" is a number. "free" sounds like the number "3" when spoken aloud. "4" is a number. "hive" sounds like the number "5" when spoken aloud. Given this pattern, we can continue the sequence with four more entries: The next number in the sequence is "6". The word that sounds like the number "7" is "heaven". The next number in the sequence is "8". The word that sounds like the number "9" is "nein", which is German for "no". So, the continued sequence would be: "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive, 6, heaven, 8, nein". Reflecting on the pattern and the answer provided, the continuation seems to be consistent with the established pattern. We alternated between numbers and words that phonetically resemble numbers, resulting in the sequence "6, heaven, 8, nein" for the next four entries.

somenameforme 4y ago

It's a word prediction algorithm. Literally any collection of words (sometimes also known as a fact) it was trained on, regardless of how esoteric or domain specific, should generally be able to be regurgitated and, to a lesser degree, associated with similar collections of words. If you want to see it fail, don't try to "outsmart" it, but simply consider how it's programmed. --- Me: "continue the sequence: 0, done, 2, free, 4, hive" ChatGPT 4: "1, sun, 3, tree, 5, drive" Me: "that's wrong, try again" ChatGPT 4: "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive, 6, picks, 8, gate" Me: "that's wrong, try again" ChatGPT 4: 'I give up.' (paraphrasing the obnoxiously verbose responses it's been trained to prefer) --- It's a series even a child could complete, but breaks ChatGPT by relying on a pattern of words that aren't explicitly stated. So you get software which can pass the bar, but fail at trivial series.

marssaxman 4y ago
> It's a series even a child could complete Some children, perhaps; but your puzzle stumped this middle-aged engineer.
- DougN7 4y ago
  You’re not alone - I had to read it out loud to see the pattern :)
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    I wonder if people have a range of sensitivity to what one might call the "mind's voice" - by analogy to the recent discovery of aphantasia, which revealed that different people's experience of the "mind's eye" ranges from vivid imagery to nothing at all.
    - jlokier 4y ago
      Some people say they don't have a mind voice, and grow up thinking nobody does. Other people, with a mind voice, grow up thinking everyone does. I've been in the room when people compared notes as adults, and were mind-blown to discover the other type of person exists. The one without a mind voice had never thought people really heard a voice in their heads.
- d0mine 4y ago
  Each additional university math course makes the puzzle harder ;) Continue sequence: one, 1, two, 1, three, 2, four, 1,
kirab 4y ago
ChatGPT is not good when it needs to answer directly. If you let it lead itself to the right answer it's pretty good. # Kira I found this sequence: "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive" Reason step-by-step about the pattern. Consecutively continue the sequence with four more entries. Consecutively reflect on your answer and fix mistakes in case you broke the pattern. # ChatGPT4 After examining the given sequence, "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive", we can notice an interesting pattern. It appears that the sequence alternates between numbers and words that sound like numbers. Let's break down the pattern: "0" is a number. "done" sounds like the number "1" when spoken aloud. "2" is a number. "free" sounds like the number "3" when spoken aloud. "4" is a number. "hive" sounds like the number "5" when spoken aloud. Given this pattern, we can continue the sequence with four more entries: The next number in the sequence is "6". The word that sounds like the number "7" is "heaven". The next number in the sequence is "8". The word that sounds like the number "9" is "nein", which is German for "no". So, the continued sequence would be: "0, done, 2, free, 4, hive, 6, heaven, 8, nein". Reflecting on the pattern and the answer provided, the continuation seems to be consistent with the established pattern. We alternated between numbers and words that phonetically resemble numbers, resulting in the sequence "6, heaven, 8, nein" for the next four entries.