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Comment by roboboffin | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why I am being downvoted. I am simply saying that we know there is a defined algorithm for solving Tower of Hanoi, and the source code for it is widely available. So, o3 producing the code as an answer, demonstrates even less intelligence, as it means it is either memorized or copied from the internet. I don't see how this point counters the paper at all.

I believe what they are trying to show in that paper, is that as the chain of operations approaches a large amount (their proxy for complexity), an LLM will inevitable fail. Humans don't have infinite context either, but they can still solve the Tower Of Hanoi without need to resort to either pen or paper, or coding.

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I didn't downvote. T the problem with the paper is that it asks the model to output all moves for, say, 15 disks 2 ^ 15 - 1 = 32767

32767 moves in a single prompt. That's not testing reasoning. That’s testing whether the model can emit a huge structured output without error, under a context window limit.

The authors then treat failure to reproduce this entire sequence as evidence that the model can't reason. But that’s like saying a calculator is broken because its printer jammed halfway through printing all prime numbers under 10000.

For me o3 returning Python code isn’t a failure. It’s a smart shortcut. The failure is in the benchmark design. This benchmark just smells.

> That’s testing whether the model can emit a huge structured output without error, under a context window limit.

Agreed. But to be fair, 1) a relatively simple algorithm can do it, and more importantly 2) a lot of people are trying to build products around doing exactly this (emit large structured output without error).

No worries, I wasn’t saying to you directly.

I agree 15 disks is very difficult for a human, probably on a sheer stamina level; but I managed to do 8 in about 15 minutes by playing around (I.e. no practice). They do state that there is a massive drop in performance at this point.

Remember that with Towers of Hanoi every extra disk doubles the number of moves required. So 15 discs is 128x more moves. If you did eight in 15m then fifteen would take you 32 hours.

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