I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus

So if you want your LLM responses to be more distributed (beyond what setting the temperature will allow), add some random english words to the start of the prompt.

Re: I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus

#7

Post by wyldfire » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

"I expected an automaton to be a good source of entropy and it turns out it is not."

BTW LLM here is doing a great job of emulating humans. They are not good at this task either.

> Nine parameter combinations produced zero entropy — perfectly deterministic output

They'd need some kind of special training to go request entropy from a system entropy device. Behaving deterministically is a feature, not a bug.

Re: I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus

#8

Post by anotheryou » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

Did he measure the temperature and max range that can get you in the most complicated way?

interesting:

- Marcus is not in this top list: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/century.html

- Marcus is its own token for TikToken (but many from that list are)

Re: I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus

#9

Post by quercusa » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

Envisioning an update to https://xkcd.com/221/

Re: I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus

#10

Post by deepsquirrelnet » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 7:47 PM UTC

Ask an llm to pick a random number from 1-10. My money is on 7.

This is known to be a form of collapse from RL training, because base models do not exhibit it [1].

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00047