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CheatGPT

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161–170 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#161

Post by mechanical_bear »

gchallen wrote: post #140

I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no. There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and exi…

“Oral exams also don't scale and raise obvious equity issues.”

Not to be intentionally obtuse, but what are the obvious equity issues?

Re: CheatGPT

#162

Post by epicureanideal »

josh2600 wrote: post #123

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

> "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?"

If you can remember, 5-10 years after you solved it.

Re: CheatGPT

#163

Post by Spivak »

thfuran wrote: post #26
jasmer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? By this reasonning nobody should ever learn anything, because it's all 'trivially doable' by machine. Like 'addition' and 'subtraction'. So let's gaslight those dumb teachers by saying they should make up 'better' homework assignments?

Intractable and unsolved problems only!

Or just novel applications of the things you learn in class.

"Congratulations! You leaned depth-first-search! ^award noises^ Below is the algorithm for reference because memorizing it just for this test is silly. You're working on a real time mapping application called Maply. Locations are represented as nodes and all direct routes between any two nodes are represented by directed weighted edges."

a) Write a function that takes a start node, an end node, and a maximum distance to travel and return the shortest path between the two.

b) Your boss said that users need to be able to add stops along their journey. Write a function that takes the final path you computed in part a and the new node for the added stop and compute the amended path changing as few of the original legs of the trip as possible (don't want to disorient your users).

c) Now your boss is saying you need to handle the situation where users make mistakes. Use the function you wrote in part b to implement this feature.

Re: CheatGPT

#164

Post by canadianfella »

josh2600 wrote: post #123

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

[dead]

Re: CheatGPT

#165

Post by shadowgovt »

I find myself wondering if the future of programming looks more like editing than synthesis.

This is not a bad thing if it's the case; a lot of the job of a software engineer is in analysis of code that exists, but so much of the pedagogy is in synthesis-from-scratch in a world that is already full of billions of lines of code.

Re: CheatGPT

#166

Post by asdff »

agrippanux wrote: post #37

What ChatGPT (and its cousins) expose is that the way humans have been taught in most schools - memorizing and regurgitating information - is now a commodity. What humans being to the table over ChatGPT is our ability to create new links between information, aka creativity. Teaching creativity, imo, will require a return to the methods like those of Sophocles and his contemporaries. I would rather this author be writ…

I went to uni 10 years ago and even then, I can't think of any classes that were just memorizing and regurgitating. You'd have to memorize fundamental concepts, but come exam time you are applying those concepts to new questions, not regurgitating anything. In high school a lot of exams were regurgitation, but I attribute it to teachers at that level just not having the niche experience required to craft clever "apply this theory" sort of questions that a domain expert in a university could do, and students in highschool are also responsible for a lot less theory learning on their own.

Re: CheatGPT

#167

Post by epicureanideal »

bcantrill wrote: post #142
josh2600 wrote: post #123

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

Yes, agreed! We ask a variant of this question (we call it "an analysis sample"); from the materials we ask candidates to submit[0]: "A significant challenge of engineering is dealing with a system when it doesn't, in fact, work correctly. When systems misbehave, engineers must flip their disposition: instead of a creator of their own heaven and earth, they must become a scientist, attempting to reason about a foreig…

To be honest, this sounds extremely difficult and not in a good way. That sounds like many many hours of writing work, to describe a problem that might be many years in the past, that might have been solved by extremely intricate methods that are easy to forget, using technologies that are now not commonly in use, etc.

A good question to ask about each interview question might be: would a good liar have an easier time answering this than a person trying to answer honestly? And if so, retire the question.

Re: CheatGPT

#168

Post by mechanical_bear »

asdff wrote: post #155
gchallen wrote: post #140

I teach CS1. A lot of this post resonated with me. In particular, I don't think that beginners are well-served by relying on AI to complete their assignments. Later on, once they've developed some computational thinking abilities, sure. Starting out, no. There's a real dearth of good options available to computer science educators today for teaching introductory material effectively in the face of all the new and exi…

For CS1 you probably don't need much compute power for assignments. Schools are already well funded enough to sometimes offer freshman ipad pros. You could offer them a raspberry pi or some extremely cheap, low powered PC, make them return it after the semester if you want to save them money. You can firewall it from the open internet, and have students turn in their code from this device alone to a university server…

“enough friction and a timesink”

Have you taught students before? Many will spend inordinate amounts of time to not learn the material. Often times it seems there is no friction too great if it allows one to not think too hard.

Re: CheatGPT

#169

Post by shadowgovt »

mahoho wrote: post #73
wayeq wrote: post #15

"In my opinion, the students learning to program do not benefit from AI helping to "remove the drudgery" of programming. At some point, you have to learn to program. You can't get there by avoiding the inevitable struggles of learning-to-program." Couldn't you say the same about how compilers 'remove the drudgery' of writing machine code? Or is that a bad analogy? Provided AI eventually gets good enough in its code g…

Abstraction works because you are able to treat an abstraction as a black box and concern yourself only with its input and output. A segment of code written by an LLM is qualitatively a very different thing; it's more like an open box of crap that you have to inspect and put together yourself, which requires knowledge of the contents, which requires experiencing the drudgery.

I rarely encounter abstractions in the wild that are as nicely "sealed" as the definition implies. Looking at an open box of crap and understanding why it's doing something other than what the author (or you) intend is a valuable skill.

(No idea if this new model of "Ask ChatGPT or Copilot to synthesize a solution and then tune that solution" provides a solid opportunity to improve that skill yet, however).

Re: CheatGPT

#170

Post by excerionsforte »

josh2600 wrote: post #123

So most interview questions like "make a binary tree" are dead. The best interview question that will never die: "What's the weirdest bug you debugged? What made it weird?" For posterity: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/my-hardest-bug-eve...

I'd be interested in seeing how we can incorporate AI into interviews. Example being entry level software engineers using AI to jam through a small project with tests in a limited time span. Lazy engineers won't check the work while others will use whatever AI generates as their draft and correct whatever bugs that are in it.

I believe that we should be taking advantage of this productivity boost across the board.

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