GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100 • Hacker News Board

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#51

Post by wongarsu » Mon, May 25, 2026, 1:48 PM UTC

linhns wrote: post #24

roenxi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be interesting to see this retried with an open model so the standard and decensored model could be compared. That'd be a clue about whether the model is avoiding it because it actively recognises the innuendo or if something else is going on.

Well then the picks will follow how the numbers are distributed in the training data. More popular numbers will show up more

That's what you'd expect. But we don't know for sure why GPT4.1 chooses 69 only a quarter as often as a random dice roll would. And we don't know if this quirk is reverted by 'uncensoring' a trained model

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#52

Post by wongarsu » Mon, May 25, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

elif wrote: post #25

In equally compelling results, my lawn mower does not cut grass to a uniformly random set of heights.

And to someone trying to make better lawn mowers it would be very intetesting to study that pattern and deduce its causes. Same for the golf course owner who wants better results from their lawn mower, or the enthusiast trying to understand its quirks

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#53

Post by iamalizard » Mon, May 25, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

indit wrote: post #20

I'm still amazed that 37, 73, and other numbers ending in 7 are the most popular "random" choices for both AI and human. Check this Veritasium video for human choice: [Why is this number everywhere?]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98 )

My take is that a random number is far from a round one, much closer to a prime one.

As a last digit:

0, 2, 4, 6 and 8 are even, so they're out.

5 is out since it makes the number divisible by 5; a semi-even number

1 and 9 are closer to an even number so it would seem fake to choose "49" or "51" just to avoid "50"

So we're left with 3 and 7.

Similar logic, for the first letter, albeit less pronounced.

So we have 33, 37, 73 and 77.

33 and 77 are "obviously" not random so it's either 37 or 73. Not using common digits, not near the beginning, middle or end. In fact, they're closer to 25 and 75 (1/4 and 3/4 of the range) than to 0, 1/2 or 1. Also closer to 1/3 and 2/3. Just random thoughts.

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#54

Post by maxloh » Mon, May 25, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #15

maxloh wrote: post #7

It could be an attack surface. Maybe one day, when we find a chatbot online, we could let it guess a random number repeatedly, then accurately infer the underlying model based on the resulting distribution.

In order to find out how real humans reply: Please guess a number between 1 and 100.

50

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#55

Post by latexr » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

> An interesting thing about humans is that they are not good random number generators. If you ask a person to "pick a random number between 1 and 100", they are remarkably predictable.

Stephen Colbert used to ask guests, as part of a joke questionnaire, “what number am I thinking of?”

Several numbers, especially “seven” came up a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-fOj7Qqvs

The answer was “three”, by the way. Which you could deduce by seeing how he responded to that guess (usually “interesting” instead of “no”) but he also confirmed it on the last show.

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#56

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

Arodex wrote: post #39

adrian_b wrote: post #9

While the results were not surprising, I found interesting that the number "69" was repressed in the output, so not even this kind of mathematical question escapes GPT censorship. It appears that recognizing the effects of censorship is the easiest way to distinguish answers generated by an "AI' from those generated by a human.

Some people asked LLM to OCR historical documents from the 19th century - any reference to "negro" was either completely ignored or replaced by "black". And it goes further: chatGPT & co are unable to answer any question about US slavery correctly because their knowledge graphs route around any mention of "negro". https://nesri.commons.gc.cuny.edu/artificial-intelligence-an...

[deleted]

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#57

Post by amai » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

Ask an AI to generate a image of random noise and you will be surprised.

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#58

Post by amai » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

I've seen a lot of code using random.seed(42). I wonder if that will cause biased scientific publishing or security issues at some point.

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#59

Post by pieter_mj » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #15

maxloh wrote: post #7

It could be an attack surface. Maybe one day, when we find a chatbot online, we could let it guess a random number repeatedly, then accurately infer the underlying model based on the resulting distribution.

In order to find out how real humans reply: Please guess a number between 1 and 100.

137

Re: GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100

#60

Post by casper14 » Mon, May 25, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

smokel wrote: post #15

maxloh wrote: post #7

It could be an attack surface. Maybe one day, when we find a chatbot online, we could let it guess a random number repeatedly, then accurately infer the underlying model based on the resulting distribution.

In order to find out how real humans reply: Please guess a number between 1 and 100.

and