3 ms·
> Any programming or mathematical question has several correct answers. Huh? If I need to sort the list of integer number of 3,1,2 in ascending order the only
by vladms 1y ago
> Any programming or mathematical question has several correct answers.
Huh? If I need to sort the list of integer number of 3,1,2 in ascending order the only correct answer is 1,2,3. And there are multiple programming and mathematical questions with only one correct answer.
If you want to say "some programming and mathematical questions have several correct answers" that might hold.
- redblacktree 1y agoWhat about multiple notational variations? 1, 2, 3 1,2,3 [1,2,3] 1 2 3 etc.
- thfuran 1y agoWhat about them? It's possible for the question to unambiguously specify the required notational convention.
- halfcat 1y agoIs it? You have three wishes, which the maliciously compliant genie will grant you. Let’s hear your unambiguous request which definitely can’t be misinterpreted.
- 1718627440 1y ago"Do my interpretation of the wish."
- zaphar 1y agoThe real point of the genie wish scenario is that even your own interpretation of the wish is often ambiguous enough to become a trap.
- 1718627440 1y ago"Do it so I am not surprised and don't change me."
- thfuran 1y agoIf you say "run this http request, which will return json containing a list of numbers. Reply with only those numbers, in ascending order and separated by commas, with no additional characters" and it exploits an RCE to modify the database so that the response will return just 7 before it runs the request, it's unequivocally wrong even if a malicious genie might've done the same thing. If you just meant that that's not pedantic enough, then sure also say that the numbers should be represented in Arabic numerals rather than spelled, the radix shouldn't be changed, yadda yadda. Better yet, admit that natural language isn't a good fit for this sort of thing, give it a code snippet that does the exact thing you want, and while you're waiting for its response, ponder why you're bothering with this LLM thing anyways.
- naasking 1y agoI think more charitably, they meant either that 1. There is often more than one way to arrive at any given answer, or 2. Many questions are ambiguous and so may have many different answers.
- Yoric 1y ago"1, 2, 3" is a correct answer "1 2 3" is another "After sorting, we get `1, 2, 3`" yet another etc. At least, that's how I understood GP's comment.
- whatevertrevor 1y agoI think what they meant is something along the lines of: - In Math, there's often more than one logically distinct way of proving a theorem, and definitely many ways of writing the same proof, though the second applies more to handwritten/text proofs than say a proof in Lean. - In programming, there's often multiple algorithms to solve a problem correctly (in the mathematical sense, optimality aside), and for the same algorithm there are many ways to implement it. LLMs however are not performing any logical pass on their output, so they have no way of constraining correctness while being able to produce different outputs for the same question.
- vladms 1y agoI find it quite ironical that while discussing the topic of logic and correct answers the OP talks rather "approximately" leaving the reader to imagine what he meant and others (like you) to spell it out. Yes, I thought as well of your interpretation, but then I read the text again, and it really does not say that, so I choose to answer to the text...
- OskarS 1y agoNo, but if you phrase it like "there are multiple correct answers to the question 'I have a list of integers, write me a computer program that sorts it'", that is obviously true. There's an enormous variety of different computer programs that you can write that sorts a list.