The scenario you've described is a variation of a classic river crossing puzzle. Here's a step-by-step solution to get the wolf, sheep, and rutabaga across the river safely:
First Trip: Take the sheep across the river and leave it on the other side. Return alone to the original side.
Current status: Sheep is on the opposite side. Wolf and rutabaga are on the original side.
Second Trip: Take the rutabaga across the river. Leave the rutabaga on the other side, but take the sheep back with you to the original side.
Current status: Rutabaga is on the opposite side. Wolf and sheep are on the original side.
Third Trip: Take the wolf across the river and leave it there. Return alone to the original side.
Current status: Wolf and rutabaga are on the opposite side. Sheep is on the original side.
Fourth Trip: Finally, take the sheep across the river.
Result: All three (wolf, sheep, and rutabaga) are on the opposite side of the river safely.
This solution ensures that at no point are the sheep and rutabaga left alone together (since the rutabaga would eat the sheep), nor are the wolf and rutabaga left alone (since the wolf would eat the rutabaga). Likewise, the sheep and wolf are not left alone without the rutabaga, which would result in the sheep eating the wolf.
> First Trip: Take the sheep across the river and leave it on the other side. Return alone to the original side.
This would leave the wolf and the rutabaga alone and the wolf eats the rutabaga. So it’s a fail? It even explains why it would be a fail, but claims it’s not:
> This solution ensures that at no point are … the wolf and rutabaga left alone (since the wolf would eat the rutabaga).
You're right, I apologize for my mistake. The problem has no solution. Initiating self-destruct sequence.
(It actually shows no sign of being stuck on the pattern of "wolf eats sheep," but no matter how many times you tell it it's wrong, it never breaks out of the pattern of guessing at incorrect solutions.)
Right. There doesn’t seem to be a solution to the problem as given. Rutabaga eats sheep. Wolf eats rutabaga. Sheep eats wolf. If you take rutabaga, sheep eats wolf. If you take sheep, wolf eats rutabaga. If you take wolf, rutabaga eats sheep. I don’t know if the intention was that it has a solution, but it clearly has no idea what it’s saying.
No, your test was great, very well-conceived to trip up an LLM (or me), and it'll be the first thing I try when ChatGPT5 comes out.
You can't throw GPT4 off-balance just by changing the object names or roles -- and I agree that would have been sufficient in earlier versions -- but it has no idea how to recognize a cycle that renders the problem unsolvable. That's an interesting limitation.
It conceptually never admits ignorance and never asks for clarifications. It always produces something, to the best of its ability. It _seems_ to be a minor technical limitation (there is plenty of traditional ML systems producing confidence %% alongside the answer from years if not decades ago, in image recognition in particular), but most likely it's actually a very hard problem, as otherwise it would be mitigated somehow by now by OpenAI, given that they clearly agree that this is a serious problem [2] (more generally formulated as reliability [1])
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI4Tpi48DlA&t=1342s (22:22, "Highlights of the Fireside Chat with Ilya Sutskever & Jensen Huang: AI Today & Vision of the Future", recorded March 2023, published May 16, 2023)
I tried it with ChatGPT-4, whatever version is on the web, my dude. It should show that in the link. I even prompted it to think harder and it got it wrong.
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The scenario you've described is a variation of a classic river crossing puzzle. Here's a step-by-step solution to get the wolf, sheep, and rutabaga across the river safely:
First Trip: Take the sheep across the river and leave it on the other side. Return alone to the original side.
Current status: Sheep is on the opposite side. Wolf and rutabaga are on the original side.
Second Trip: Take the rutabaga across the river. Leave the rutabaga on the other side, but take the sheep back with you to the original side.
Current status: Rutabaga is on the opposite side. Wolf and sheep are on the original side.
Third Trip: Take the wolf across the river and leave it there. Return alone to the original side.
Current status: Wolf and rutabaga are on the opposite side. Sheep is on the original side.
Fourth Trip: Finally, take the sheep across the river.
Result: All three (wolf, sheep, and rutabaga) are on the opposite side of the river safely.
This solution ensures that at no point are the sheep and rutabaga left alone together (since the rutabaga would eat the sheep), nor are the wolf and rutabaga left alone (since the wolf would eat the rutabaga). Likewise, the sheep and wolf are not left alone without the rutabaga, which would result in the sheep eating the wolf.