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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

I just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which appears to have improved its response with CoT but there's mistakes that demonstrate the model doesn't really "understand":

Q: A woman and her son are in a car accident. The woman is sadly killed. The boy is rushed to hospital. When the doctor sees the boy he says "I can't operate on this child, he is my son". How is this possible?

C: Let me think about this step by step:

A woman and her son are in an accident

The woman (the mother) dies

The boy is taken to hospital

A doctor says they can't operate because the boy is their son

But the mother is dead...

Ah! The doctor is the boy's father. This is a classic riddle that highlights gender bias - many people assume doctors must be men, but don't initially consider that the doctor could be the father. Alternatively, the doctor could be the boy's other mother in a same-sex relationship, though this wasn't the original intent of the traditional riddle.

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I must be to tired as I can't find any flaw in that reasoning.

The joke/riddle text is "he says" but Claude says "their son" and suggests the doctor might be a woman.

More substantively: "This is a classic riddle that highlights gender bias - many people assume doctors must be men, but don't initially consider that the doctor could be the father." is totally nonsensical.

The text is a gender (and meaning) inversion of the classic riddle to confuse LLMs. Even though Claude correctly CoTs that the doctor is the father, it seemingly then copypastas the explanation to the original riddle but swaps the gender, completely missing the point.

Except that Claude often takes into account things it thinks might be typos.

This is not code. Forgetting a semi colon will not make the output break. It thinks 'maybe they wrote he instead of she' and then gives options for both situations.

It is meant to solve real world situations where people might not type properly, it is not a word problem solving machine.

> The doctor is the boy's father. This is a classic riddle that highlights gender bias - many people assume doctors must be men, but don't initially consider that the doctor could be the father.

It identified the pattern, but it didn't understand the father is a man while the mother is a woman. If people assume doctors must be men, they wouldn't consider that the doctor could be the mother.

(Side note: this is an antiquated riddle/joke ... for me in particular because my mother is a doctor, but in general around half of new doctors are female, and think about Grey's Anatomy and other shows.)

I read it as “most people don’t connect put 2 and 2 together - the doctor could be the boys father”. It is poorly worded, but not strictly wrong I think?

o1 also gets it wrong. It answered

"The doctor is the boy’s other parent—specifically his mother, who wasn’t in the accident."

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