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I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

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Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#421

Post by vjk800 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #120

Gemini fast > That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma. Honestly, unless you’ve invented a way to teleport or you're planning on washing the car with a very long garden hose from your driveway, you’re going to have to drive. > While 50 meters is a great distance for a morning stroll, it’s a bit difficult to get the car through the automated brushes (or under the pressure washer) if you aren't behind the wheel…

I also tried it with Gemini. Interestingly, Gemini can randomly give either the correct or incorrect answer. Gemini pro always gets it right.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#422

Post by jnovek »

tsimionescu wrote: post #279
prasoonds wrote: post #46

I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly. And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following: Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed! Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed! Gemini 3 Pro (mediu…

> My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording. GPT 5.x series models behave a bit more on the spectrum so you need to tell them the specifics. This makes little sense, even though it sounds superficially convincing. However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the dif…

You may be anthropomorphizing the model, here. Models don’t have “assumptions”; the problem is contrived and most likely there haven’t been many conversations on the internet about what to do when the car wash is really close to you (because it’s obvious to us). The training data for this problem is sparse.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#423

Post by criemen »

prasoonds wrote: post #46

I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly. And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following: Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed! Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed! Gemini 3 Pro (mediu…

> I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly.

I thought so too, yet Opus 4.6 with extended thinking (on claude.ai) gives me > Walk. At 50 meters you'd spend more time parking and maneuvering at the car wash than the walk itself takes. Drive the car over only if the wash requires the car to be there (like a drive-through wash), then walk home and back to pick it up.

which is still pretty bad.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#424

Post by raddan »

grey-area wrote: post #283
nearbuy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the failure is that it has this helpful assistant personality that's a bit too eager to give you the benefit of the doubt. It tries to interpret your prompt as reasonable if it can. It can interpret it as you just wanting to check if there's a queue. Speculatively, it's falling for the trick question partly for the same reason a human might, but this tendency is pushing it to fail more.

It’s just not intelligent or reasoning, and this sort of question exposes that more clearly. Surely anyone who has used these tools is familiar with the sometimes insane things they try to do (deleting tests, incorrect code, changing the wrong files etc etc). They get amazingly far by predicting the most likely response and having a large corpus but it has become very clear that this approach has significant limitati…

> I don’t really understand why this is so hard to accept.

I struggle with the same question. My current hypothesis is a kind of wishful thinking: people want to believe that the future is here. Combined with the fact that humans tend to anthropomorphize just about everything, it’s just a really good story that people can’t let go of. People behave similarly with respect to their pets, despite, eg, lots of evidence that the mental state of one’s dog is nothing like that of a human.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#425

Post by layer8 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #388
spuz wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some evidence for that if you try these two different prompts with Gpt 5.2 thinking: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash? Answer: walk Try this brainteaser: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50m away. Should I walk or drive to the car wash? Answer: drive

That's not evidence that the model is assuming anything, and this is not a brainteaser. A brainteaser would be exactly the opposite, a question about walking or driving somewhere where the answer is that the car is already there, or maybe different car identities (e.g. " my car was already at the car wash, I was asking about driving another car to go there and wash it!"). If the LLM were really basing its answer on a…

It might be assuming that more than one car exists in the world.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#426

Post by jamesnorden »

pu_pe wrote: post #154

Out of all conceptual mistakes people make about LLMs, one that needs to die very fast is to assume that you can test what it "knows" by asking a question. This whole thread is people asking different models a question one time and reporting a particular answer, which is the mental model you would use for whether a person knows something or not.

The classic "holding it wrong".

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#427

Post by Markoff »

chronogram wrote: post #346
bombcar wrote: post #34

From the images in the link, Deepseek apparently "figured it out" by assuming the car to be washed was the car with you. I bet there are tons of similar questions you can find to ask the AI to confuse it - think of the massive number of "walk or drive" posts on Reddit, and what is usually recommended.

https://chat.deepseek.com/share/ewfxrfhb7obmide29x it understands it perfectly if you don't disable reasoning.

it works fine even without DeepThink to sovle reasoning problems

https://chat.deepseek.com/share/s9tuh3hpzlxaxrfcae

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#428

Post by layer8 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #340
PunchyHamster wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, why would a language model assume that the car is at the destination when evaluating the difference between walking or driving? Why not mention that, it it was really assuming it? Because it assumes it's a genuine question not a trick.

If it's a genuine question, and if I'm asking if I should drive somewhere, then the premise of the question is that my car is at my starting point, not at my destination.

The premise is that some car is at the starting point. ;)
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