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I was just thinking the opposite - that by choosing such a tiny problem one might be able to actually develop some intuition about what's going on inside that very black box

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I meant it mostly as a joke, but there is a certain amount of irony to it. This goes way beyond prompt engineering - he wrote an algorithm to run on GPT in a way you would not expect a non-programmer to write. I think the idea is cool and the process to write it was revealing.

Right. What non-programmer is going to think to turn a word into character list with positional metadata sprinkled in.

I used a similar technique for a completely unrelated task. My "original" idea.

It’s actually weirdly similar to the kind of tricks people use for mental feats like memorizing the order of a complete deck of cards or repeating back a long list of words in reverse order.

When you think about every mental task GPT3 is being asked to do as being something it is being asked to perform immediately and without having prepared and as fast as possible this makes a lot more sense.

Like, a reasonable human response to “quick! What’s encyclopedia backwards?!” Would be more like

“Er.. right. A. I. D. E. O? Oh wait is it one of those OE ligature things? P. A. No, O. P. Hang on did I already say P?”

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