When ChatGPT sees '473936482738338373926', it tokenizes it into 7 tokens, not 20. You can play with it here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platf

When ChatGPT sees '473936482738338373926', it tokenizes it into 7 tokens, not 20. You can play with it here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer So to reverse the string, it can't just learn a kind of generic string reversal algorithm that goes character-by-character and outputs a result character-by-character. If it learned to output the tokens in reverse order, it would give a wrong answer (something like '926373...936473'.) Instead it has to learn something more complicated, like how each token is related to some other token that is its reverse, or how to identify it as a computational task and run some Python.