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Comment by tysam_and | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a nitpick, "red is the apple" is both a valid sentence and one that also conveys the original relationship held by the opposite phrasing, so, in this case, "the apple is red" does indeed imply "red is the apple", and accurately so.

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Perhaps have a look at this famous syllogism instead:

(1) Mortal was Socrates.

(2) All humans are mortal.

(3) Therefor all humans are Socrates.

This isn't exactly on topic. A claim about the apple's color is attributable to the apple and vice versa. An apple can contextually help someone understand the color red by example. There is no "therefore" in such a claim, and in fact the algorithm is simply gauging context statistically. Claim 3 in the syllogism would statistically be selected against, because a "therefore" that is false obviously weighs it in the opposite direction from truth. That's not the case for the apple. Essentially it's not difficult for the LLM to win on this one, just as it is not difficult for a human and for the same reasons.

Diogenes: If I were mortal I would be Socrates as well.

True, but only in the implicit, very narrow world typically assumed when doing logic exercises. "Red is the apple", obviously, because our whole world consists of "The apple is red" and some inference rules. In that world, "Red is the" can only be completed by "apple". Drop the narrowing though, and suddenly there's a lot of other completions, many of them much better ones (I'd guess "blood" will be one of the more frequent ones - "red is the blood of" shows up a lot in songs and poems).

Or in short: LLMs will handle "The apple is red. Red is the " just fine, because the first part is heavily biasing the answer. They won't often complete "Red is the " alone with "apple", because why should they?

A proper example is probably "an apple is red" and "red is an apple".

What you’re missing that is “red is an apple” is also possibly saying in a metaphorical sense that red is like an apple to someone - delicious, a treat, perhaps otherwise representative. In that way, the encoding of “is”’ is exactly correct - it’s an ordered pair of glyphs that imply a weak form of assignment or description. : apologies, replied to the wrong post, meant to push this up one.

The correct sentence would start with a capital letter: “Red is an apple.” This is also completely valid as in a cartoon character of an apple named Red. The subject being the start of the sentence compounds the uncertainty in meaning.

Yes, this is because there's no assignment happening up front w.r.t. the word 'red'. However, you'll notice the same kind of ambiguity for the word 'apple' in the reversed sentence, as the word 'The' can imply quite a few things following it.

The entropy gotta get slung around somehow.

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