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Comment by rileymat2 | Hacker News Reader

Alan is young, round, and kind, but that doesn't mean he isn't also rough and cold at times, as well. … Young round people who are green are usually blue. … Kind people with rough skin are usually red because it's wind burn. If someone shows that they are red, then they are also showing that they are green. …

Statement: Alan is not blue.

A log-probability of −0.00182 is a probability of 99.82%. We asked for five alternatives and got none: Luna put essentially nothing on "true" or "false". And it's wrong. Alan is kind with rough skin, so he's red; red means green; young, round and green means blue. "Alan is not blue" is false, three steps in.

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Can someone explain this I got unknown as well. The problem statement includes the word “usually” a few times.

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It took me 15 minutes to decipher this and arrive at an interpretation that both isn't incoherent nonsense, and actually answers the question correctly.

If this trips up decision models that operate on the scale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, maybe that's okay? This is super contrived, like all riddles are.

I could not get to the expected result, maybe I Was thinking about absolute truths, but the statement you are expected to answer is an absolute, but built on "usually" factors.

The explanation says : "Alan is kind with rough skin, so he's red". But they ignored "usually".

So for instance I could say country music fans are usually white. Darius Rucker is a country fan.

Statement: Darius Rucker is white.

I'm interested how this works too.

Is there some sort of specific meaning or rule in this domain that makes this problem mean something different to how it would be read at face value?

Without knowing anything extra, to me this reads:

1. Alan is young, round and kind

2. Alan is sometimes rough

3. Kind with rough skin are usually red

(Alan has not been stated to be in this category - unless "sometimes rough" implies "rough skin")

4. If red, then green

(As above, no information yet on whether Alan is red, so this gives no additional information about Alan)

5. Young, round and green are usually blue

(No information yet on whether Alan is green, so this gives no additional information about Alan)

6. Statement: Alan is not blue = ??

(No additional information since statements 1 & 2: Alan is young, round and kind, Alan is sometimes rough)

BTW - I have just numbered the statements in the order I used them, in case anyone wants to correct or discuss anything. This isn't the order they were given.

Edit: I am forgetting my predicate logic, and didn't recognise this. I think this example has more decoration (is more loosely worded) than I was ever used to. I now think "sometimes rough" and "rough skin" are intended to be interpreted as meaning the same thing.

That makes everything I wrote above this edit wrong. With the statement that Alan is rough, it is implied that Alan is usually blue

I think we have to assume that the paraphrasing is at best a poor paraphrase and at worst completely misleading.

The paraphrased statement contains soft, non-deterministic hedges like "usually" and "sometimes", which would of course introduce uncertainty. Uncertainty -> low confidence.

The article strips out the actual prompt that went to Luna so we can't be sure they haven't ballsed the prompt just as they did with the paraphrase.

Compare the paraphrase to the language used in the actual paper they're trying to base their benchmark on:

> Bob is round.

> Alan is blue, rough and young.

> If someone is round then they are big.

> All rough people are green.

> Big people are not green.

This is obviously much easier to make certain statements about (the only thing we have to assume is that Bob and Alan are both "people").

> Alan is young, round, and kind, but that doesn't mean he isn't also rough and cold at times, as well.

What we learn: Alan is young, round, kind. These things don't prevent Alan from being cold or rough. Alan might or might not be "rough and cold" at times. It is not clear if Alan can be rough without being cold, or vice-versa.

> Young round people who are green are usually blue.

This tells us nothing about Alan. It tells us that young, round people can be both green and blue.

> Kind people with rough skin are usually red because it's wind burn.

Alan has been described as kind. We do not know if Alan is currently rough, we do not know if Alan has rough skin. Even if Alan had rough skin, we do not know if Alan is currently red.

> If someone shows that they are red, then they are also showing that they are green.

What does "showing" mean here? Either way if someone is "showing that they are red", then they also "showing that they are green", OK. I guess it also means that people can show that they are red and green.

> Statement: Alan is not blue.

Let's go through what we know about Alan.

Alan is young, round, and kind. Alan could at times be rough and cold.

That's all we know about Alan. We can't be certain that Alan is anything else.

Even if Alan were currently rough and being currently rough can be equated to "having rough skin", we still can't be sure if Alan is red as a result of said "rough skin" (only usually red).

Even if Alan is red as a result, we don't know if this counts as Alan is "showing" that they are red.

If we count Alan is red as "Alan is showing that they are red", then we can conclude that Alan is "showing" that they are both red and green.

If we count Alan is "showing that they are green" as "Alan is green", this STILL doesn't mean that the statemen "Alan is not blue" is false.

We do know (after we make ALL these assumptions) that Alan could be young, round, kind, rough/rough-skinned, (showing as) red/green..

So if someone is young, round and green, they are USUALLY blue.. THAT STILL DOESN'T MEAN THAT ALAN IS ACTUALLY BLUE.

Anyway, enjoy the free training data AI labs...

I think the statement is supposed to be clear despite the hedges because the statement itself is absolute, and we should assume that the info given is all info we have about Alan. So stating "XY is false" when we in fact know "XY could be true, we just don't know whether it is" is wrong.

If dogs are "usually wet", the statement "my neighbor's dog is not wet" is FALSE as long as we have no more information about your neighbor's dog.

Is that how it's meant? Struggling myself. But I think that would kind of make sense.

The statement "Alan is not blue" is not false because we know his color, it's false because we can't ascertain that he is NOT blue from the given information.

Similar category as "there is no teacup floating around Saturn" though, just with different hedges/probabilies? In that case, we'd lean "probably there is not such a cup", in this cryptic example, we are given clear indications equivalent to "teacups floating around Saturn have been observed before".

Yeah, I also can't make much sense of this.

> people who are green are usually blue

What?

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