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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34084 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I fixed it.

Dang. Who ever thought that counting the letters in a word would be the final boss.

International Math Olympiad? Child's play. Counting the number of R's in Strawberry? Real shit.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

In this case the LLM is trained on data containing word tokens instead of words. So it can't actually see the letters of words and can't do certain wordplay.

I will laugh my ass off if the hack that solves this turns out to be “generate an image of the word ‘strawberry’,” followed by, “how many R’s are there in this image?”

In part, that's pretty funny, but I'm not exactly sure how my brain answers that question. I think by spelling it out loud in my head (even though I would parse it as a single token while reading or listening), but I could imagine someone more visually-oriented might describe something like what you're saying. The mind is weird, man.

How does your brain answer the question?

My brain works by splitting it into straw and berry, and then adding 1 and 2. As for how I know how many rs are in each,"straw" just seems obvious, similar to if someone asked me if 9 is bigger than 8. "Berry" is a bit more complicated; I think my mind goes "it has an r in it, but it's a weird word, so it's probably 2."

Huh. Subjectively, I feel like I visually scan the word from left to right and increment a counter every time the scanner passes over an R, but I don’t really consider myself to be a “visual thinker” at all.

I could see myself doing that if it was already in written form. If you asked me verbally, or I looked somewhere else, it would be verbal, though.

Definitely an interesting exercise.

Billions of hours of captcha solving led to this.

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