this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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LLMs are incredibly bad at any math because they just predict the most likely answer, so if you ask them to generate a random number between 1 and 100 it's most likely to be 47 or 34. Because it's just picking a selection of numbers that humans commonly use, and those happen to be the most statistically common ones, for some reason.
doesn't mean that it won't try, it'll just be incredibly wrong.
Son of a bitch, you are right!
now the funny thing? Go find a study on the same question among humans. It's also 47.
It's 37 actually. There was a video from Veritasium about it not that long ago.
A well-known mentalism "trick" from David Blaine was when he'd ask someone to "Name a two digit number from 1 to 50; make each digit an odd digit, but use different digits", and his guess would be 37. There are only eight values that work {13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, 39}, and 37 was the most common number people would choose. Of course, he'd only put the clips of people choosing 37. (He'd mix it up by asking for a number between 50 and 100, even digits, different digits, and the go-to number was 68 iirc.)