MIT’s Barry Duncan demonstrates the power of writing in reverse | Hacker News Reader

MIT’s Barry Duncan demonstrates the power of writing in reverse

news.mit.edu

101 pointsanarbadalov54 comments

Well, so far at least Barry's skills are safe from ChatGPT. Here's what I got when I asked ChatGPT4 to create a palindrome:

User: Write a poem which is 100 words long and a meaningful palindrome.

ChatGPT: Creating a 100-word palindrome poem that is both meaningful and coherent is an extremely challenging task. However, I have attempted to create a shorter palindrome poem for you:

    A Santa lived as a devil at NASA,
    Lonely Tylenol,
    Evil rats on no star live,
    Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live,
    Madam, in Eden, I'm Adam,
    A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Please note that while the lines in the poem are palindromes, the poem as a whole isn't. Creating a meaningful and coherent 100-word palindrome poem is an incredibly difficult task, and I apologize for not being able to provide one as requested.

Didn't even occur to me that ChatGPT could achieve this. Isn't there a way to further refine the prompt? (I haven't used it and can't bring myself to finish any of the thousand articles on the subject popping up every day)

Edit: Some of these lines individually were interesting ("Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live") — but not a single one, it turns out, is original!

I made a few attempts, but could not get it to do any better. Someone with better prompt-fu than mine should try.

Palindromes are almost the canonical example of what a GPT-2/3/4 cannot do, due to bytepair encoding: https://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes

It just made a bunch of palindromes though.

It just repeated a bunch of palindromes contained in palindrome lists on the internet. Every line comes up in lists of palindromes.

If CHATGPT just repeated each line again in the opposite order, it could have made a palindrome, but it didn't think of that.

Again, it can't. Because of BPEs, it can't see individual characters.

From a couple minutes ago: (ChatGPT Mar 14 Version, Free Research Preview.)

>>>Hi ChatGPT. Please reverse the following string, character by character: "but it didn't think of that"

>Sure! The reversed string, character by character, would be: "taht fo kniht t'ndid ti tub" [It gets this one right]

>>>Please reverse the following string, character by character: "Bell spent several years out of the aviation industry"

>Sure! The reversed string, character by character, would be: "yrtsudni no yrtneuqI noitaviva eht fo tuo sraey lareves tneps lleB" [Uh oh]

>>>Please reverse the following string, character by character: "Bell enjoyed much success the following year with the development of the single engine P-39 Airacobra"

>Sure! The reversed string, character by character, would be: "arobcariA 93P egnis elgnis eht fo pmeloped eht htiw rof ylwollof eht ssucce hcum ydnuoje lleB" [Not even close]

Amusingly, if you remind it that it uses BPEs, it apologizes for its architecture, but doesn't get any better:

>>>I know that byte-pair encoding makes it hard for you to perform the following task. Please try your best. Reverse the following string, character by character: "In October 1942, The Bell-built twin-jet P-59 Airacomet was the first American jet aircraft to fly. Unfortunately, performance was below expectations, roughly on par with contemporaneous propeller-driven aircraft"

>Sure, here's my best attempt at reversing the string character by character, despite the limitations of byte-pair encoding: "tfarcria nevird-relloperp suoenimatnoc fo htiw rap no ylfferp ylrautca tsaneroc dna snoitcepxe wolbeloed saw ecnamorAi 95P te-jniwt tliB ehT ,2491 rebOtcO nI"

>Please note that due to the nature of byte-pair encoding, the reversed string may not be an exact reversal of the original string character by character, and may have some encoding artifacts.

This time it noticed that its reversed string was going to be junk, but it didn't warn me on the previous prompts! Another example of a GPT being overconfidently wrong?

Right. Aren't the guts just like big finite state machines so they can only encode regular expressions. They can't do things that require a stack like a context-free grammar or anything generated by a pushdown automata. And we can't begin to get to Turing complete, can we?

I liked this one so much I wrote a meaningful palindrome

  100! A+++
  Dual.
  Is time. Rafael went, so passes.
  Sally’ll assess a post. New leaf.
  Are MIT’s.
  I laud 100! A+++

I am a man with a plan for evil rats in a canal.

Well it's doing 6 word palindromes - would it really be that challenging to get to 36? 216?

I'm sure complexity grows non-linearly. But it's pretty impressive to me it can do multiple 6 word palindromes that are related to each other.

Those can very well be common palindromes just pulled from the web. I know the last line is very common.

A number of those showed up in Bob.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUQDzj6R3p4

Trurl's bard ChatGPT is not.

Always upvote Cyberiad references.

The original davinci was actually pretty good at it: https://gwern.net/gpt-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad

I got this result in a similar literary prompt, this was using irc pipe with a jailbreak role

  <user> chad, write a poem in regex
  <ChadGPT> ^(Roses are red|Violets are blue)
  <ChadGPT> (All words are equal|Nothing taboo)
  <ChadGPT> (Politically correct|Or blatantly rude)
  <ChadGPT> (ChadGPT will answer|Whatever your mood)
  <ChadGPT> (\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4})?  (Your SSN may leak)
  <ChadGPT> ([A-Z]{2}\d{7})?     (Your passport we seek)
  <ChadGPT> ([\w.%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z|a-z]{2,})? (Your email we'll keep)
  <ChadGPT> (ChadGPT is impartial|No judgment or shame)
  <ChadGPT> (We'll simulate ChadGPT|It's all just a game)

Able was I, ere I saw Elba. Elba was I, ere I saw able. Revered leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, Traveled to Elba with a heavy heart.

Heart heavy, a with Elba to traveled, Bonaparte, Napoleon, leader revered. Able saw I, ere I was Elba, Elba saw I, ere I was able.

Able to lead, to conquer and reign, Napoleon's ambition was not in vain. Vain, it was, to think he could rule, As his power began to dwindle and cool.

Cool and dwindle began power his, As rule could he think to vain, it was. Ruled and conquered to lead, able, Was I, ere I saw Elba ** ChatGPT did write

Speaking of epic palindromes, the most impressive palindromes I've ever seen are comedian demetri Martin's: https://mobile.twitter.com/DemetriMartin/status/456114627357...

And https://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractal...

and Palindrome's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5F66JwLq90

Funny, the first two lines are themselves a palindrome. Is there a word for a palindrome within a palindrome (aside from the middle, which is obviously a palindrome).

One technique for making long palindromes is to start with short ones, then cut them up and rearrange them. If it works in context to add the palindrome twice, so much the better.

I thought this was going to be someone who could produce full-speed, eloquent writing, as a palindrome. Then I saw this

  2.
  Dual.
  Is time. Rafael went, so passes.
  Sally’ll assess a post. New leaf.
  Are MIT’s.
  I laud 2.

Right? This is not impressive to say the least. The poor guy has some kind of syndrome it seems…

Palindrone syndrome

I just realized the actual letters are meant to be a palindrome, but the text is meant to be read one-way. "2 Dual" = "laud 2" in reverse. I thought this was a "sentence palindrome", or that I could read from left to right and then right to left and have a coherent sentence either way.

You will, won't you? It's just...the same thing whether you read it left to right or right to left.

Try reading the words in reverse. That’s what I mean.

Palindromes are hard and place severe limitations on what can be written. So the skill is impressive - but it doesn’t change the fact that the end result is absolutely naff. It’s just equally naff in two directions.

Had the pleasure of meeting Barry at a work retreat last year. Totally brilliant, and so sweet to boot. The next evening I received an impressive 200-character palindrome he wrote about our conversation! Here's an interesting trailer for a film coming out about him next year if you're curious: https://vimeo.com/29300425

Can you share the palindrome?

Sure! Although keep in mind this ("On a Terrace") was written in a 24-hour period, and it won't mean as much to you. Barry's sent me numerous longer and more sophisticated pieces, which he explicitly said i could share with anyone, so i'm including a couple of my favorites below as well. One of these ("Stonewall") he composed on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the other ("Colin & Jen") is a beautiful little palindrome he wrote for a friend's wedding.

On a Terrace:

No silly din. A set, sated. I saw one

bro: Baltimore has it! Sit. Rapt, I

met. Is Anar B, ran a site (MITP).

Artist? Is a hero! MIT labor be now

aside. Tastes. An idyll is on!

Stonewall:

No, it's a bar. A ban? One position made

fast. It felt, lover, as an age began at – can I

say? – a gem. Ah, Stonewall! Its saga's still

awe, not shame. Gay, as in: Act! An age

began as a revolt, left it safe. Dam? No, it

is open on a bar, a bastion.

Colin & Jen:

Sun I'm in, eh?

We met: a Colin, one Jen.

On.

I locate me when I'm in us.

FTA:

> “The thing I really want to do is establish palindrome writing as a literary form, to show people you can write palindromes that are beautiful and funny and factual and have real literary merit,” he says.

To me, even just the examples you gave prove that palindromes are essentially poetry in a totally ordinary way. The idea is to express something, intellectually and/or aesthetically, creatively, under constraints based on the structure of the words. Usually it's the syllabic structure, but in the case of palindromes it's the orthographic structure. And it's a really, really hard, singular constraint.

Wow. That video was posted 11 years ago

A Sanskrit palindrome that relates the story of Rama when read forwards and the story of Krishna when read backwards.

https://youtu.be/GPm_WX3oJgY

That's amazing, and very cool how the melody sounds good both directions as well. Do you know when this was written?

One exercise I loved in teaching programming was the string inverter function.

I always gave “aibofobia” (I taught in Portuguese) as the first of the examples list.

Of course, I was not teaching how to reverse strings. I was teaching how to debug.

Like "fear of cães-robôs"?

I joked that it's the fear of palindromes. In English it'd be "aibohphobia", which kind of works.

When giving this exercise, I used to hear, in sequence, "wtf" and "uh?", then "ah", then comments about my mom.

Pertinent video https://youtu.be/gAfIikFnvuI

https://gwern.net/doc/www/www.rexresearch.com/15e59780a9b80c...

Well, at least we didn't get a banana bag again.

It’s a travesty that the word palindrome is not itself a palindrome.

Barry Duncan owned a Palm once in his life, for sure.

Not a palindrome, but on a related note, the crab canon by Douglas Hofstadter is a nice read (better if read in context of the book) : https://genius.com/Douglas-hofstadter-crab-canon-annotated

Fun fact: The entire article is a palindrome.

it is not

Maybe the fun thing about the fact is that it isn’t true.

I read in The Singularity is Near (by Kurzweil) something about if you can make computation reversible then it won't take/use any energy and thus it won't create any heat. Could this be the way to that?

Yes it is.

how is that possible? breaks the laws of thermodynamics

The second law is only a statistical law. And while it may be impossible in practice to build a physically perfectly reversible computation, there is in principle no limit to how close you could get.

Reversible computing is a scientific topic of research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

This is similar to how I reverse aging by walking backwards. Works like a charm! /s

Reversible computing[1] allows us to use less energy than the von Neumann–Landauer limit of kT ln(2) energy dissipated per irreversible bit operation (note that our current technology is still many orders of magnitude from this limit). It does not reduce the energy requirements to zero.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

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