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The exact text is as so. > After the line label (if any), must follow one of the following statement identifiers: DO, PLEASE, or PLEASE DO. These may be used i

The exact text is as so. > After the line label (if any), must follow one of the following statement identifiers: DO, PLEASE, or PLEASE DO. These may be used interchangeably to improve the aesthetics of the program. The identifier is then followed by either, neither, or both of the following optional parameters (qualifiers): (1) either of the character strings NOT or N’T, which causes the statement to be automatically abstained from (see section 4.4.9) when execution begins, and (2) a number between 0 and 100, preceded by a double-oh-seven (%), which causes the statement to have only the specified percent chance of being executed each time it is encountered in the course of execution. Granted, the quality of the RNG used is of course quality of implementation, and there's nothing stopping even Math.random() from just returning 4. Reading the document though, it does appear the author is correct, alas.

layer8 3y ago
Arguably, “the specified percent chance of being executed each time” implies that the choice taken each time must not be predictable and thus must be truly random.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I don't believe it does. To me, it implies that over K passes the statement must be executed P times, with P being close to N/100 * K. Assuming N - the specified percent chance - can only be an integer constant, naive implementation would hardcode random-looking pattern for all 100 values of N.
  - layer8 3y ago
    I interpret it more literally, as “each time it is encountered in the course of execution”, “the statement” must “have only the specified percent chance of being executed”. The “each time” for me implies that you can’t just consider the global statistics over all execution, but instead the probability must hold for each single execution of the statement. If it is 100% predictable, that would mean that for any given single execution of the statement the probability would be either 0 or 100%, so in general not the specified probability.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I agree this is more reasonable, but at least in programming languages with a language standard and multiple compiler/runtime implementations, you have to read it like a language lawyer - if the spec allows multiple reads, compiler/runtime authors are free to choose whichever read they like, and conversely, users must not assume anything but what's explicitly stated. With that in mind, my (however weak) defense of GPT-4 here is that it's taking a language lawyer approach to the problem and refuses to make assumptions narrower than justified by the reference documentation it knows.
      - db48x 3y ago
        No, GPT-4 isn’t reasoning about the language standard (as a language lawyer or otherwise), because GPT-4 does not reason about anything. All it does is pick the most likely next token, given the ones that have come before. Very few people talk about INTERCAL on the internet, so it has very little training data to go on. It keeps regurgitating parts of the documentation and the wiki page because that’s all it has. For example, the line “… the `%50` operation (which in INTERCAL means to mingle the bits of two 16-bit numbers) …” is nonsense because the mingle operation is denoted by a “¢” character, not a “%”. All the language model knows is that the tokens “to mingle the bits of two 16-bit numbers” are likely to follow “which in INTERCAL means”.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        At GPT-4 level, saying "All it does is pick the most likely next token, given the ones that have come before" is like saying all people do is actions that maximize their wealth, based on what they saw worked best before. Technically close enough, but also missing the point. Yes, GPT-4 is predicting next tokens best associatied with ones that came before. It does so based not on one score, but a hundred thousand ones. The extreme amount of dimensions of the latent space are enough to capture pretty much any kind of semantic or structural association you can come up with. I'm not convinced that this isn't sufficient in principle to cover most of what we'd call reasoning.
        3y ago

layer8 3y ago

Arguably, “the specified percent chance of being executed each time” implies that the choice taken each time must not be predictable and thus must be truly random.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
I don't believe it does. To me, it implies that over K passes the statement must be executed P times, with P being close to N/100 * K. Assuming N - the specified percent chance - can only be an integer constant, naive implementation would hardcode random-looking pattern for all 100 values of N.
- layer8 3y ago
  I interpret it more literally, as “each time it is encountered in the course of execution”, “the statement” must “have only the specified percent chance of being executed”. The “each time” for me implies that you can’t just consider the global statistics over all execution, but instead the probability must hold for each single execution of the statement. If it is 100% predictable, that would mean that for any given single execution of the statement the probability would be either 0 or 100%, so in general not the specified probability.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I agree this is more reasonable, but at least in programming languages with a language standard and multiple compiler/runtime implementations, you have to read it like a language lawyer - if the spec allows multiple reads, compiler/runtime authors are free to choose whichever read they like, and conversely, users must not assume anything but what's explicitly stated. With that in mind, my (however weak) defense of GPT-4 here is that it's taking a language lawyer approach to the problem and refuses to make assumptions narrower than justified by the reference documentation it knows.
    - db48x 3y ago
      No, GPT-4 isn’t reasoning about the language standard (as a language lawyer or otherwise), because GPT-4 does not reason about anything. All it does is pick the most likely next token, given the ones that have come before. Very few people talk about INTERCAL on the internet, so it has very little training data to go on. It keeps regurgitating parts of the documentation and the wiki page because that’s all it has. For example, the line “… the `%50` operation (which in INTERCAL means to mingle the bits of two 16-bit numbers) …” is nonsense because the mingle operation is denoted by a “¢” character, not a “%”. All the language model knows is that the tokens “to mingle the bits of two 16-bit numbers” are likely to follow “which in INTERCAL means”.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        At GPT-4 level, saying "All it does is pick the most likely next token, given the ones that have come before" is like saying all people do is actions that maximize their wealth, based on what they saw worked best before. Technically close enough, but also missing the point. Yes, GPT-4 is predicting next tokens best associatied with ones that came before. It does so based not on one score, but a hundred thousand ones. The extreme amount of dimensions of the latent space are enough to capture pretty much any kind of semantic or structural association you can come up with. I'm not convinced that this isn't sufficient in principle to cover most of what we'd call reasoning.
        3y ago