Comment by andyk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyk | Hacker News Reader

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My personal point was just to document my exploration of using prompts to generate new prompts, and more specifically the case where the prompts contain state and each recursively generated prompt updates that state to be closer to an end goal (which in this case I compared to the concept of a base case in recursion).

For whatever reason Patrick H. Winston's MIT OCW lecture on Cognitive Architectures always stuck with me, and in particular his summary of the historical system from CMU called General Problem Solver (GPS) in which they try to identify a goal and then have the AI evaluate the difference between the current state and the goal and try take steps to bridge the gap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PimSbFGrwXM&t=189s

The ability for LLMs to break down problem into sub-steps (a la "Let's think step by step" [1]) reminded me of this part of Winston's lecture. And so I wanted to try making a prompt that (1) contains state and (2) can be used to generate another prompt which has updated state.

[1] Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners - https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916

>> My personal point was just to document my exploration of using prompts to generate new prompts, and more specifically the case where the prompts contain state and each recursively generated prompt updates that state to be closer to an end goal (which in this case I compared to the concept of a base case in recursion).-

I don't understand what you mean by "state". I think you're using the term too loosely, like you use "recursion", so loosely that it loses all meaning.

To have state you need to have memory that you can read from and write to. To have recursion you need memory organised in a specific manner, as a stack.

There's nothing like that in your prompt, or in the setup of the bot that you interact with. It doesn't "recursively geneate" any "prompt updates", it takes your prompt, prepends it to its responses and your prompts until now, and generates a new response. If anything, it produces its responses sequentially, not recursively.

Anyway you're being rather freewhiling with terminology and I don't understand what you are trying to say. Are you trying to make the bot compute a recursive function, or not? Why are you using Fibonacci, if not? Why not just ask it for Little Red Riding Hood or the Three Little Piggies instead?

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