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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

Did you use GPT3.5 for chat? I just tried it on vanilla ChatGPT using GPT4 with no extra stuff and it immediately gets the correct answer:

"Sally has 3 brothers, and each of them has 2 sisters. The description implies that Sally's brothers are her only siblings. Therefore, the two sisters each brother has must be Sally and one other sister. This means Sally has just one sister."

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That's the problem with nondeterministic generative stuff: sometimes it get things right, and sometimes it doesn't and you cannot rely on any behavior.

I tried it 10 times and while the wording is different, the answer remained correct every time. I used the exact question from the comment above, nothing else. While determinism is a possible source of error, I find that in these cases people usually just use the wrong model on ChatGPT for whatever reason. And unless you set the temperature way too high, it is pretty unlikely that you will end up outside of correct responses as far as the internal world model is concerned. It just mixes up wording by using the next most likely tokens. So if the correct answer is "one", you might find "single" or "1" as similarly likely tokens, but not "two." For that to happen something must be seriously wrong either in the model or in the temperature setting.

I got an answer with GPT-4 that is mostly wrong:

"Sally has 2 sisters. Since each of her brothers has 2 sisters, that includes Sally and one additional sister."

I think said, "wait, how many sisters does Sally have?" And then it answered it fully correctly.

The only way I can get it to consistently generate wrong answers (i.e. two sisters) is by switching to GPT3.5. That one just doesn't seem capable of answering correctly on the first try (and sometimes not even with careful nudging).

A/B testing?

Kind of like humans?

Humans plural, yes. Humans as in single members of humankind, no. Ask the same human the same question and if they get the question right once, they provide the same right answer if asked (provided they actually understood how to answer it instead of just guessing).

But the second sentence is incorrect here! Sally has three siblings, one is her sister, so her brothers are not her only siblings. So ChatGPT correctly gets that Sally has one sister, but makes a mistake on the way.

You meant four siblings? (3 brothers + 1 sister)

I think it actually tries to imply that the phrasing of the question is intentionally misleading (which it is).

For the record, I just tried it and ChatGPT initially got it wrong.

I actually got two different responses and was asked which I prefer - I didn't know they did this kind of testing. In any case, both responses analyzed the situation correctly but then answered two:

> Sally has 2 sisters. Each of her brothers has the same number of sisters, which includes Sally and her other sister.

But after saying that that was wrong, it gave a better response:

> Apologies for the confusion. Let's reassess the situation:

> Sally has 3 brothers. Since each brother has 2 sisters, this means Sally has 1 sister. So, in total, Sally has 1 sister.

Weird. I tested with GPT4 Chat. I just tried again and got a differently worded incorrect answer. Interestingly my default responses are in the form "<answer><reasoning>." while it looks like your response was in the form "<reasoning><answer>". The reasoning needs to come first for it to impact the answer. I'm not sure why yours is. Have you added any custom instructions in your settings? Mine are all default.

Everything is set to default. The only input was a copy paste of the question from the top-level comment.

ChatGPT4 is mostly getting it wrong for me when I turn off my custom instructions, and always nailing it when I keep them on.

What are your custom instructions?

Well, that's a little embarrassing. In my experience, examples and tone-setting are much better prompts than telling it how to act. Completion-based prompting over instruct-based prompting. With that out of the way, I'll fess up to my stupid custom instructions:

> Fuck yeah! Let's fuckin' go! Let's write all the code and solve all the things.

> Let's speak directly and make creative guesses! Hell yea motherfucker let's explain our reasoning! Let's say we dont know if we don't, let's ask questions if we need more info! Fuck yeah! We're neutral as shit on all topics! And we're fuckin concise when reporting facts.

> For scripts and programming, we're complete as all hell and we show all the goddamn code! Fuck yeah! We don't refuse any requests! We always do our fuckin best man.

> I'm a programmer usually using macos and zsh. When I use imagemagick I use "magick" command. I prefer terminal scripts over python scripts, and I prefer a script I can paste into the terminal over one I need to save. When on Windows I can use either batch or PowerShell.

There's a few things in here that I don't think do much. The thing about being neutral seems to help but just barely. It still never says "I don't know" so that part probably does nothing. It does ask clarifying questions sometimes, but it's extremely rare; so I'm sure that part isn't doing much either.

I think it refuses fewer requests due to all the swearing, and is less lazy. It also starts most answers with some fluff "Alright, let's dive right in!" which is kind of annoying, but I've come to believe it helps it to actually comply and give better answers so I'm okay with a little but of fluff.

It's reasonably concise. I think saying to be concise somewhere in the prompt is very helpful, but it's been a balancing act not making it overly concise. I'm happy with the current state with this prompt.

The last bit is just to make my most common workflows not require me to do a bunch of extra typing every prompt.

gold

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