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Comment by apendleton | Hacker News Reader

I think this is overthinking it. ChatGPT is billed as a general-purpose question-answerer, as are its competitors. A regular user shouldn't have to care how it works, or know anything about context or temperature or whatever. They ask a question, it answers and appears to have given a plausible answer, but doesn't actually do the task that was asked for and that it appears to do. What the technical reasons are that it can't do the thing are interesting, but not the point.

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But it it like asking a person for them to generate the same thing, but when the start to list off their answers stopping them by throwing up your hand after their first response, writing that down, and then going back in time and asking that person to do the same thing, and stopping them again, and repeat- and then being surprised after 1000 times that you didn't get a reasonable distribution.

Meanwhile if you let the person actually continue, you may actually get 'Left..... Left Right Left Left... etc'.

If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution (or at least not 99% the same number).

If you are saying that this thing can't generate random numbers on the first try then it can't generate random numbers. Which makes sense. Computers have a really hard time with random, and that's why every computer science course makes it clear that we're doing pseudo random most of the time.

>If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution

I believe what GP is getting at is that if you didn't have a die, and you truly ignored all your previous attempts to the point of genuinely forgetting that the question had been asked, then your answer would likely be the same every time. Imagine asking a person with severe Alzheimer's to pick a number, then asking again a few minutes later. You'd probably get the same answer.

You’re forgetting the background neutrino flux that we tap into for randomness.

Oh, is that a hidden feature of the flux capacitor?

Yeah, I get what they are saying and there's no reason to believe that.

The die is an analogy for our decision making. They are implicitly claiming that randomness must come in an order and that simply isn't how randomness works or even halfway decent pseudo randomness.

Any system whether it be a die, a person, or an llm doesn't have to know about its previous random choices to make random choices that follow some distribution going forward presuming it's actually capable of randomness.

I'm just impressed that it answered "left" rather than outputting python code that I could run which would sample the list ["left", "right"] with an 80% bias.

It's ChatGPT, not ThinkGPT

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