Show HN: GPT crushes my high score in 2048.io
GPT4 just told me that a billion golf balls take up 40 billion cc, and since packing efficiency of spheres is as high as 74%, they take up 26 billion cc.<p>No, you have to <i>divide</i> by 0.74, not multiply.<p>In shit that GPT4 is not trained on (like code code code and more code), it can get really goofy.<p>Earlier in the same chat about golf balls, it claimed that if brain cells were the size of golf balls (an imaginary thread I started) there would have to be 40 billion of them.  That doesn&#x27;t follow; the number of brain cells is an external quantity that we hold constant, not related to what size we are imagining them to be. (The number is wrong too, the common estimate is over 80 billion.)<p>GPT4 wheedles tidbits of information out of your own questions and tries to work them into answers. For instance, today it claimed that the Lomuto partitioning scheme often seen in Quicksort implementations requires external storage of one bit per array element. That&#x27;s utterly false; it requires no external storage proportional to the array, just a few registers to manipulate the values and array indices and whatnot. I had talked about an <i>idea</i> involving one bit of storage earlier in the chat. The stochastic DJ just jammed a needle into that groove and went with it.<p>I asked it where can I get a copy of Hoare&#x27;s original paper on Quicksort. It said that it&#x27;s hard to find because the paper is very old, blah blah. Just excuses for not knowing where that might be. I switched to another window and found in two seconds with Google on an Oxford website, free PDF download of complete text.<p>A few days ago I asked GPT4 what is the cell of a honeycomb called in Japanese. It told me instead what a honeycomb is called. I explained, the cell of a honeycomb is a distinct object from the honeycomb. It had no idea what the cell might be called, in spite of being capable of chatting in fluent Japanese with you at the drop of a hat.<p>I found the info in the Japanese Wikipedia on honeycombs: a caption under a picture of them calls them &quot;heya&quot;, which is a common word for room (e.g. bedroom).  Guess that&#x27;s not one of the billions of texts it has assimilated.<p>Another trick up GPT4&#x27;s scheme is to ask you for hints when it can&#x27;t solve something. You have to give it so many hints that it doesn&#x27;t need to solve the actual problem, but then it acts like it has reasoned it out. When confronted it admits, yes, sorry, the answer was deduced from your hints in such and such a way.<p>Can&#x27;t say it&#x27;s not entertaining, though.<p>I went through this protracted exercise whereby I took a paragraph from Edgar Allan Poe, and encrypted it with a Vigenère cipher. I convinced GPT4 to try to crack it. First I had to get past its ethical objections. We worked out a protocol whereby it can ask me questions, the answers to which prove that I know the plaintext and key, without it revealing the key to me.  Eventually it forgot about its ethical obligation and was revealing to me the key that it thinks it might be. Which, if that were right, would amount to cracking the text for me.<p>I convinced it to actually perform the letter frequency analysis to try to crack the key length. It was close so I just gave that away.<p>In my ciphertext, I preserved word divisions, and also case.  I told GPT4 about this and encouraged it to use the information. Like a single-letter lower case ciphertext word is likely a.  It tried to use this but was getting the position wrong, and the key offset wrong and other logical issues. In the end, I gave it so many hints about where the plaintext comes from that it pulled it from the network and then pretended to have solved the problem.<p>It then made up a fictitious Vigenère key and sad, hey look, with this key that I cracked, your ciphertext decodes to the first paragraph oif the Fall of the House of Usher.  I reminded that it couldn&#x27;t possibly be the key because the real one is six characters long (as we established several times in the chat). It was basically just spewing smooth sounding text.<p>It&#x27;s not pure bullshit. It&#x27;s like raisins of clarity in a pudding of bullshit or something. We are seeing some sparks of something that resembles intelligence. In 5, 15 years we will be having different conversations about this stuff (not to mention with).