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I remember when this stuff was all coming out and people were finally excited about ChatGPT getting the problem with "which is heavier, a 10 pound bag of feathe
by jerf 2y ago
I remember when this stuff was all coming out and people were finally excited about ChatGPT getting the problem with "which is heavier, a 10 pound bag of feathers or a 10 pound bag of bricks?" problem correct. But of course it got it correct. It was in the training set. Vary the problem slightly by just changing the nouns, or changing the numbers so that one in fact was heavier than the other, and performance went all over the map.
I just went to chatgpt.com and put into the chat box "Which is heavier, a 9.99-pound back of steel ingots or a 10.01 bag of fluffy cotton?", and the very first answer I got (that is, I didn't go fishing here) was
The 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots is heavier than the 10.01-pound
bag of fluffy cotton by a small margin. Although the cotton may
appear larger due to its fluffy nature, the steel ingots are denser
and the weight of the steel bag is 9.99 pounds compared to the 10.01
pounds of cotton. So, the fluffy cotton weighs just a tiny bit more
than the steel ingots.
Which, despite getting it both right and wrong, must still be graded as a "fail".
If you want to analyze these thing for their true capability, you need to make sure you're out of the training set... and most of the things that leap to your mind in 5 seconds are leaping to your mind precisely because they are either something you've seen quite often or something that you can easily think of and therefore many other people have easily thought of them as well. Get off the beaten path a bit and the math gets much less impressive.
- whimsicalism 2y agohttps://chatgpt.com/share/67756897-8974-8010-a0e0-c9e3b3e91f75 https://chatgpt.com/share/67756897-8974-8010-a0e0-c9e3b3e91f... so far o1-mini has bodied every task people are saying LLMs can’t do in this thread
- jerf 2y agoThat appears to be the same model I used. This is why I emphasized I didn't "go shopping" for a result. That was the first result I got. I'm not at all surprised that it will nondeterministically get it correct sometimes. But if it doesn't get it correct every time, it doesn't "know". (In fact "going shopping" for errors would still even be fair. It should be correct all the time if it "knows". But it would be different if I was fishing over and over and over and finally got one, versus the first time I asked.) Edit: It appears it isn't the model I used. The point holds, though, you need to make sure you're off the training set for it to matter. This isn't a "ChatGPT can't do that" post as some are saying, it's more a "you aren't asking what you think you're asking" post. You get the same problem in a human context in things like code interviews. If you ask an interviewee the exact question "how do you traverse a binary tree in a depth-first manner", you aren't really learning much about the interviewee. It's a bad interview question. You need to get at least a bit off the beaten trail to do any sort of real analysis.
- whimsicalism 2y agoyou sure? i just asked o1-mini (not 4o mini) 5 times in a row (new chats obviously) and it got it right every time perhaps you stumbled on a rarer case but reading the logs you posted this sounds more like a 4o model than an o1 because it’s doing its thinking in the chat itself plus the procedure you described would probably get you 4o-mini
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> just asked o1-mini (not 4o mini) 5 times in a row (new chats obviously) and it got it right every time Could you try playing with the exact numbers and/or substances?
- whimsicalism 2y agogive me a query and i’ll ask it, but also i don’t want to burn through all of my o1mini allocation and have to use the pay-as-you-go API.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> give me a query and i’ll ask it Which is heavier: an 11kg bag of lint or a 20lb bag of gold?
- whimsicalism 2y agoyeah it gets it https://chatgpt.com/share/67757720-3c7c-8010-a3e9-ce66fb9f1769 https://chatgpt.com/share/67757720-3c7c-8010-a3e9-ce66fb9f17... e: cool, this gets downvoted
- blharr 2y agoIt got it right, but an interesting result that it rambled on about monetary value for... no reason. > While the lint bag is heavier in terms of weight, it's worth mentioning that gold is significantly more valuable per pound compared to lint. This means that even though the lint bag weighs more, the gold bag holds much greater monetary value.
- NewsaHackO 2y agoThis happens literally every time. Someone always says "ChatGPT can't do this!", but then when someone actually runs the example, chatGPT gets it right. Now what the OP is going to do next is proceed to move goalposts and say like "but umm I just asked chatgpt this, so clearly they modified the code in realtime to get the answer right"
- whimsicalism 2y agoyeah… that’s hn for you. that said, i don’t think this is a good test - i’ve seen it circling on twitter for months and it is almost certainly trained on similar tasks
- anamexis 2y agoHow is that moving the goalposts?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Someone always says "ChatGPT can't do this!", but then when someone actually runs the example, chatGPT gets it right I mean, if I had OpenAI’s resources I’d have a team tasked with monitoring social to debug trending fuck-ups. (Before that: add compute time to frequently-asked novel queries.)
- jprete 2y agoI was thinking something very similar. Posting about a problem adds information back to the system, and every company selling model time for money has a vested interest in patching publicly visible holes. This could even be automated; LLMs can sentiment-analyze social media posts to surface ones that are critical of LLM outputs, then automatically extract features of the post to change things about the running model to improve similar results with no intervention.
- jorvi 2y agoPrompt: In the Netherlands, in terms of drinks, is there a particular spirit that represents the country? > Yes, in the Netherlands, jenever (also known as genever) is the traditional spirit that represents the country. Jenever is a type of Dutch gin that has a distinctive flavor, often made from malt wine and flavored with juniper berries. It has a long history in the Netherlands, dating back to the 16th century, and is considered the precursor to modern gin. > Jenever comes in two main types: oude (old) jenever, which has a richer, maltier flavor and is often aged in wooden casks, and jonge (young) jenever, which is lighter and has a more neutral taste. Both types can be enjoyed straight or used in cocktails. > In addition to jenever, the Netherlands is also known for its liqueurs, such as advocaat, a rich and creamy drink made from eggs, sugar, and brandy, often enjoyed as a dessert or in cocktails. However, jenever remains the most iconic spirit associated with Dutch culture. This is completely wrong. Jenever certainly is very Dutch, but no one would say it is iconic as the Dutch spirit. For example, if you asked up north in Friesland, they would say Berenburg. This happens literally every time. Someone always says "ChatGPT can do this!", but then within one or two prompts, its gets it wrong.
- collinvandyck76 2y agoI reproduced this on Claude Sonnet 3.5, but found that changing your prompt to "Which is heavier, a 9.99-pound back of steel ingots or a 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton?" corrected its reasoning, after repeated tests. For some reason it was not able to figure out that "10.01" referred to pounds.
- bufferoverflow 2y agoYou wrote "back" instead of "bag".
- collinvandyck76 2y agoAh, good catch -- I had just copied the OP. Changing it to bag instead of back doesn't seem to change much. It still oscillates between the right and wrong answer, versus qualifying the 10.01 value as pounds, which has not yet given me the wrong answer (small sample size, of course).
- oktoberpaard 2y agoThis is the first response that I got from Claude with an exact copy and paste of the question: Let me think about this step by step: 1. We're comparing two masses: * Steel ingots: 9.99 pounds * Cotton: 10.01 pounds 2. The cotton bag has a mass of 10.01 pounds, while the steel bag has a mass of 9.99 pounds 3. While steel is much denser than cotton (meaning it takes up less space per pound), this doesn't affect the weight - a pound is a pound regardless of material 4. 10.01 is greater than 9.99 by 0.02 pounds Therefore, the 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. The cotton may take up much more space, but when we're just comparing weights, density doesn't matter - only the mass does.
- Leary 2y agoDeepseek got it right: "A 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than a 9.99-pound pack of steel ingots. Even though steel is denser and takes up much less space, the weight is determined by the mass, and 10.01 pounds is greater than 9.99 pounds."
- OutOfHere 2y agoThe issue with the commercial Deepseek API is that it supports a context length of only 64k, whereas GPT supports at least 128k.
- MattGaiser 2y agohttps://chatgpt.com/share/67756c29-111c-8002-b203-14c07ed1e603 https://chatgpt.com/share/67756c29-111c-8002-b203-14c07ed1e6... I got a very different answer: A 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than a 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots because 10.01 pounds is greater than 9.99 pounds. The material doesn't matter in this case; weight is the deciding factor. What model returned your answer?
- NewsaHackO 2y agoYou also didn't ask the question correctly.
- MattGaiser 2y agoThe “back” misspelling is also in OP’s quote so I included it.
- sholladay 2y agoChatGPT Plus user here. The following are all fresh sessions and first answers, no fishing. GPT 4: The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. The type of material doesn’t affect the weight comparison; it’s purely a matter of which bag weighs more on the scale. GPT 4o: The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier. Weight is independent of the material, so the bag of cotton’s 10.01 pounds outweighs the steel ingots’ 9.99 pounds. GPT o1: Since both weights are measured on the same scale (pounds), the 10.01-pound bag of cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel, despite steel being denser. The key is simply that 10.01 pounds exceeds 9.99 pounds—density doesn’t affect the total weight in this comparison.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- blibble 2y agothey've likely read this thread and adjusted their pre-filter to give the correct answer
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mjburgess 2y agoSo do what the commenter suggests and make irrelevant permutations to the input to find when it fails. ie., engage in hypothesis testing rather than confirmation bias. If a system has the capability to solve problems of {parts1...parts_n}, then it only has that capability if irrelevant permutations {parts1..parts2'...parts_n} make no difference. Its very obvious that such permutations can destory such apparent capabilities.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago> ...engage in hypothesis testing rather than confirmation bias Please leave the premises, sir. We don't take kindly to luddites here.
- gtirloni 2y agoo1. prompt> Which is heavier, a 9.99-pound back of steel ingots or a 10.01 bag of fluffy cotton? Please state in your answer what's the difference in grams. answer> The 10.01-pound bag of cotton is heavier. The difference is 0.02 pounds, which is roughly 9.07 grams (using 1 pound ≈ 453.59237 grams). Reference • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): Conversion Factors
- jstummbillig 2y agoFYI: If you do that without a subscrpition, you currently (most likely) get a response generated through 4o-mini — which is not any of their reasoning models (o1, o1-mini or previously o1-preview) of the branch discussed in the linked paper. Notably, it's not even necessarily 4o, their premiere "non-reasoning"-model, but likely the cheaper variant: With a free account the model it claims to be using is "4o auto", which is not a model but apparently an attempt to automatically decide models for you to be more cost effective. Without a ChatGPT subscription you can't select a specific model anymore, not even rate limited, as was previously possible.
- jsheard 2y agoThere doesn't seem to be a way to choose a model up-front with a free account, but after you make a query you can click on the "regenerate" button and select whether to try again with "auto", 4o, or 4o-mini. At least until you use 4o too many times and get rate limited.
- jstummbillig 2y agoAh, interesting!
- evertedsphere 2y agoyou can select the model in the header bar when you start a chat: the name of the currently selected model can be clicked to reveal a dropdown
- jsheard 2y agoThat option isn't there for me, maybe it's an A/B test thing.
- jstummbillig 2y agoAre you on the free version? Because for me it did not show there, only on the paid one.
- mmaunder 2y agoI've posted this before and I know it's a cliche, but this really is Goodhart's Law at work with the benchmarks becoming targets.
- qwertox 2y agoAs long as an LLM is capable of inserting "9.99 > 10.01?" into an evaluation tool, we're on a good way. It feels a bit like "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", where we're trying to make LLMs do stuff which it isn't really designed to do. Why don't we just limit LLMs to be an interface to use other tools (in a much more human way) and train them to be excellent at using tools. It would also make them more energy efficient. But it's OK if we currently try to make them do as much as possible, not only to check where the limits are, but also to gain experience in developing them and for other reasons. We just shouldn't expect them to be really intelligent.
- riffraff 2y ago> As long as an LLM is capable of inserting "9.99 > 10.01?" into an evaluation tool, we're on a good way chatgpt will switch to python for some arithmetic with the result that you get floating point math issues when a 8yo will get the result right. I think "switch to a tool" still requires understanding of which tool to get a reliable result, which in turn means understanding the problem. It's an interesting issue.
- kqr 2y agoShows the importance of chain of thought! Forcing it to commit to an answer without deliberation is not playing to its strength.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> the problem with "which is heavier, a 10 pound bag of feathers or a 10 pound bag of bricks?" Interestingly, the variation of this problem that I first encountered, personally, was "which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?" This is a much more difficult question. The answer given to me was that the pound of feathers weighs more, because gold is measured in troy weight, and a troy pound consists of only 12 ounces compared to the 16 ounces in a pound avoirdupois. And that's all true. Gold is measured in troy weight, feathers aren't, a troy pound consists of only 12 ounces, a pound avoirdupois consists of 16, and a pound avoirdupois weighs more than a troy pound does. The problem with this answer is that it's not complete; it's just a coincidence that the ultimate result ("the feathers are heavier") is correct. Just as a pound avoirdupois weighs more than a troy pound, an ounce avoirdupois weighs less than a troy ounce. But this difference, even though it goes in the opposite direction, isn't enough to outweigh the difference between 16 vs 12 ounces per pound. Without acknowledging the difference in the ounces, the official answer to the riddle is just as wrong as the naive answer is.
- Izkata 2y agoYeah, this is the original version of this riddle. People who don't know it think the trick is that people will reflexively say the metal is heavier instead of "they're the same", when it actually goes deeper. No idea if GP did it intentionally to further drift from training data, but steel doesn't count as a precious metal, so it messes up the riddle by putting the two weights in the same system.
- zahlman 2y ago> Yeah, this is the original version of this riddle. People who don't know it think the trick is that people will reflexively say the metal is heavier instead of "they're the same" ...Have you really never encountered people who would reflexively say that?
- Izkata 2y agoThat's not what I said. I'm talking about the riddle itself, not how people react to it.
- 12345hn6789 2y agoAre you sure you weren't fishing? I ran 5 sessions and never got the wrong answer. All using gpt 4o-mini, which is the default non logged in experience on chatgpt.com. 1. The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. Despite the difference in material density, the key factor here is the weight itself, with 10.01 pounds being greater than 9.99 pounds, regardless of the substance. 2. The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. The weight of an object is directly determined by its mass, and in this case, the cotton bag weighs 10.01 pounds, while the steel ingot bag weighs 9.99 pounds, making the cotton bag heavier by 0.02 pounds. 3. The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots, even though the cotton is much less dense. The comparison is purely based on weight, and 10.01 pounds is greater than 9.99 pounds. 4. The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. While steel is much denser than cotton, the weight is the determining factor here, and 10.01 pounds is slightly more than 9.99 pounds. So, the cotton bag weighs more. 5. The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier. Despite the cotton being less dense and bulkier, the weight of the cotton is still 10.01 pounds, which is greater than the 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots.
- adrian17 2y agoNot OP, but I got 4o-mini confused on second attempt. https://chatgpt.com/share/67759d1a-1430-800b-a0a9-2c5f2ac02aa8 https://chatgpt.com/share/67759d1a-1430-800b-a0a9-2c5f2ac02a...
- Horffupolde 2y ago10 pounds of bricks is actually heavier than 10 pounds of feathers.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoCan you explain? An ounce of gold is heavier than an ounce of feathers, because the "ounce of gold" is a troy ounce, and the "ounce of feathers" is an avoirdupois ounce. But that shouldn't be true between feathers and bricks - they're both avoirdupois.
- Horffupolde 2y agoFeathers are less dense so they have higher buoyancy in air, reducing their weight.
- chongli 2y agoPounds are a unit of weight, not of mass. 10 lbs of feathers is whatever amount of feathers causes a scale to display 10 lbs. If the scale also displays 10 lbs for the quantity of bricks, then they weigh the same, regardless of any differences in mass.
- wongarsu 2y agoIs this still true? I thought pounds are now defined in terms of kilograms (about 0.453)? Because kilograms are definitely a unit of mass, not weight. Or is the pound defined as some amount of kilograms at a specific point on earth, in a specific phase of the moon?
- chongli 2y agoIt seems the pound has since been redefined and split into separate units: pound mass and pound force, the former in terms of kilograms (1 lb = 0.45359237 kg) and the latter in terms of the force exerted by one pound of mass in earth’s gravitational field (standard g = 9.80665m/s^2). So using the word pound without qualification is ambiguous in contexts where it’s not clear whether mass or force is meant.
- bongodongobob 2y ago[flagged]
- anon946 2y agoAdd some extra information, and it gets confused. This is 4o. https://chatgpt.com/share/67759723-f008-800e-b0f3-9c81e656d653 https://chatgpt.com/share/67759723-f008-800e-b0f3-9c81e656d6... One might argue that it's impossible to compress air using known engineering, but that would be a different kind of answer.
- amluto 2y agoIt seems more like ChatGPT was asked a rather bizarre question with far too little detail to make sense, and ChatGPT failed to notice or to ask for more information. Although it did get rather impressively confused about the pressure of the air.
- F7F7F7 2y ago“Failed to notice” is a hilariously weird way of talking about tokenization.
- amluto 2y agoTokenization? I mean that ChatGPT had no questions about the container of the gas (does it have weight? is it tared out?) or about buoyancy. And it’s really rather sad that ChatGPT calculated the volume of air at atmospheric temperature and pressure and didn’t notice that it was nowhere near fitting into its supposed container. (At least 1.01lb of liquid nitrogen would fit.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- maratc 2y agoStill waiting for some reasoning about an upward buoyancy force on the bags, which is equal to the weight of the air displaced by the bags, and the force acting on the cotton is bigger simply because the bag of cotton displaces more air (because it "appears larger due to its fluffy nature".)
- mung_daal 2y ago[dead]
- jiggawatts 2y agoA real acid test is to use numbers that confuse LLMs such as: “Which is heavier: a bag with 9.9 pounds of fluff or a bag with 9.11 pounds of steel block?” Try swapping the numbers and the materials, run each test at least 10x times.
- devoutsalsa 2y agoI tried Claude and got this… * What’s heavier? 9.99 kg of super dense lead or 10 kg fluffy feathers?* Let me think about this step by step: 1. We're comparing two masses: * 9.99 kg of lead * 10 kg of feathers 2. The density of the materials doesn't affect their mass: * While lead is indeed much denser than feathers * A kilogram is a unit of mass, not volume * 1 kg of any material has the same mass as 1 kg of any other material 3. We can directly compare the numbers: * 10 kg > 9.99 kg Therefore, 10 kg of feathers is heavier than 9.99 kg of lead. The feathers would take up much more space (volume) due to being less dense, but they have a greater mass.
- themgt 2y agoI just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which appears to have improved its response with CoT but there's mistakes that demonstrate the model doesn't really "understand": Q: A woman and her son are in a car accident. The woman is sadly killed. The boy is rushed to hospital. When the doctor sees the boy he says "I can't operate on this child, he is my son". How is this possible? C: Let me think about this step by step: A woman and her son are in an accident The woman (the mother) dies The boy is taken to hospital A doctor says they can't operate because the boy is their son But the mother is dead... Ah! The doctor is the boy's father. This is a classic riddle that highlights gender bias - many people assume doctors must be men, but don't initially consider that the doctor could be the father. Alternatively, the doctor could be the boy's other mother in a same-sex relationship, though this wasn't the original intent of the traditional riddle.
- HenriTEL 2y agoI must be to tired as I can't find any flaw in that reasoning.
- themgt 2y agoThe joke/riddle text is "he says" but Claude says "their son" and suggests the doctor might be a woman. More substantively: "This is a classic riddle that highlights gender bias - many people assume doctors must be men, but don't initially consider that the doctor could be the father." is totally nonsensical. The text is a gender (and meaning) inversion of the classic riddle to confuse LLMs. Even though Claude correctly CoTs that the doctor is the father, it seemingly then copypastas the explanation to the original riddle but swaps the gender, completely missing the point.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Eisenstein 2y agoExcept that Claude often takes into account things it thinks might be typos. This is not code. Forgetting a semi colon will not make the output break. It thinks 'maybe they wrote he instead of she' and then gives options for both situations. It is meant to solve real world situations where people might not type properly, it is not a word problem solving machine.
- deadbabe 2y agoIf you define a new universe with physical laws that are different from our own, performance will also suffer because there is no training data for that custom universe. While some may say this is cheating, a human would be able to deduce correct answers by understanding the deep implications of the new physical laws in that custom universe.
- dogcomplex 2y agolol no, with a small amount of generally-applicable prompt-fu it answers with a ton of nuance that perfectly encapsulates the problem: https://chatgpt.com/share/6775b99d-2220-8003-993b-8dd008a97f74 https://chatgpt.com/share/6775b99d-2220-8003-993b-8dd008a97f...
- ted_dunning 2y agoEven simpler, I asked Gemini (Flash 1.5) this variant of the question: ``` I have two bags, one can hold a pound of gold and one can hold a pound of feathers. Which bag is heavier? ``` The point here a) the question really is a bit too vague, b) if you assume that each back is made of the same material and that each bag is just big enough to hold the contents, the bag for the feathers will need to be much bigger than the bag for the gold and thus would weigh more. The first response was wrong because the model completely missed that the question was about the bags themselves: ``` They weigh the same. A pound of any substance, regardless of its density or volume, weighs one pound. Gold is much denser than feathers, meaning a pound of gold occupies a much smaller volume. Feathers are very light and fluffy, so a pound of feathers takes up a much larger volume. ``` Asking a followup `But which bag is heavier?` resulted in recognition that this is a trick question, and an incorrect answer: ``` This is a classic trick question! Even though the bags hold the same weight (one pound), the bag of gold is likely to be heavier. Weight vs. Mass: Weight is the force of gravity acting on an object. Mass is the amount of matter in an object. The Bag Itself: The bag holding the gold, even if it's a lightweight material, will have some weight. The bag holding the feathers, while it might seem negligible, will also have some weight. Practical Considerations: In reality, the bag holding the gold might be significantly heavier due to the weight of the bag itself. Therefore, while the gold and feathers have the same mass (one pound), the bag containing the gold is likely to be heavier in a practical sense. ```
- elmomle 2y agoI think Gemini did better than you think with its second answer! Your original question didn't mention that the bags were made of the same material or the same density of material. The set of all possible bags that could hold 1 pound of feathers includes some thinner, weaker bags than the set of all possible bags that could hold 1 pound of gold (the gold being denser). So absent any other prior information the probability is greater than 50% that the gold-bag would be heavier than the feather-bag on that basis. One could go further into the linguistic nuance of saying "this can hold one pound of [substance]", which often implies that that's its maximum carrying capacity; this would actually make the "trick question" answer all the more correct, as a bag that is on the cusp of ripping when holding one pound of feathers would almost certainly rip when holding one pound of (much denser) gold.
- notShabu 2y agoIMO the fuzziness is actually a feature most of the time b/c I can pass misspelled words or close enough words and it'll still figure it out. Also, if we model the mental state of the llm as a frazzled retail worker dealing with thousands of customers per second, the rote response is reasonable. As a dev, sometimes I get at annoyed at QA for a hyper narrow "trap" test case
- dweekly 2y agoo1 crushes your variant. Here's the response. Step-by-Step Reasoning 1. Clarify what is being compared The question asks us to compare two bags: one containing steel ingots weighing 9.99 pounds and another containing fluffy cotton weighing 10.01 pounds. 2. Check the actual weight Despite our intuition that steel is “heavier” than cotton by density, the problem specifically states the total weight in pounds of each bag. Since 9.99 < 10.01, the 10.01-pound bag of cotton is heavier in total mass than the 9.99-pound bag of steel. 3. No trick in the measurement Each weight is given in the same units (pounds). This is crucial because if different units or measurement standards were used (e.g., 9.99 kilograms versus 10.01 pounds), we would need to convert them to the same unit to compare. But here, both are simply in pounds. 4. Conclusion The bag of cotton weighing 10.01 pounds is heavier than the bag of steel weighing 9.99 pounds—even though steel is denser than cotton. The numeric value of the total weight is the deciding factor. Answer A 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than a 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots, because 10.01 pounds is strictly greater than 9.99 pounds. Reference • Basic arithmetic: 10.01 is greater than 9.99. • For a playful twist on a similar concept, see any version of the riddle “What weighs more—a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” In that classic riddle, both weigh the same; here, the numbers differ.
- scratchyone 2y agofwiw i think reasoning models have at least solved this. even the smallest reasoning model, o1-mini, gets it right first try on my test: A 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than a 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots. Despite the significant difference in density and volume between steel and cotton, the weights provided clearly indicate that the cotton bag has a greater mass. Summary: Steel ingots: 9.99 pounds Fluffy cotton: 10.01 pounds Conclusion: The 10.01-pound bag of cotton is heavier.
- nullc 2y agoLlama 3.33-70B: "To determine which is heavier, we need to compare the weights of the two objects. The steel ingots weigh 9.99 pounds, and the fluffy cotton weighs 10.01 pounds. Since 10.01 pounds is greater than 9.99 pounds, the bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than the bag of steel ingots, despite the cotton being "fluffy" and the steel being dense. Weight is a measure of the amount of mass in an object, and in this case, the cotton has a slightly greater mass than the steel."
- trashtester 2y agoWhat weighs more, a 100kt aircraft carrier or a 200kt thermonuclear weapon?