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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?

#611

Post by sarthakjain »

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…

These days LLMs refuse to back track and use their intelligence to justify their answers.

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

ChatGPT said: Walk.

At ~50 meters, driving saves essentially no time once you factor in unlocking, starting, pulling out, and parking, and it adds a small but real chance of minor dings or awkward maneuvering in a tight car-wash entry. Walking is simpler and lower-friction.

You said: okay how should the car reach there?

ChatGPT said: Drive it there when you’re ready to start the wash.

Walk over first to check the queue/payment situation and confirm they’re open. If it’s clear, walk back, get the car, and drive the 50 meters into the bay. If they handle pickup, hand them the keys and walk.

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

#612

Post by sathish316 »

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 can feel the AGI on this one :)

I ran extensive tests on this and variations on multiple models. Most models interpret 50 m as a short distance and struggle with spatial reasoning. Only Gemini and Grok correctly inferred that you would need to bring your car to get it washed in their thought stream, and incorporated that into the final answer. GPT-5.2 and Kimi K2.5 and even Opus 4.6 failed in my tests - https://x.com/sathish316/status/2023087797654208896?s=46

What surprised me was how introducing a simple, seemingly unrelated context - such as comparing a 500 m distance to the car wash to a 1 km workout - confused nearly all the models. Only Gemini Pro passed my second test after I added this extra irrelevant context - https://x.com/sathish316/status/2023073792537538797?s=46

Most real-world problems are messy and won’t have the exact clean context that these models are expecting. I’m not sure how the major AI labs assume most real-world problems are simpler than the constraints exposed by this example like prerequisites, ordering, and contextual reasoning, which are already posing challenges to these bigger models.

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

#613

Post by Departed7405 »

I tested Gemini 3 Flash (no visible reasoning trace). It gave me a choice matrix. Said that unless it was getting soap and a sponge, I should drive.

Kimi 2.5 said I needed to drive, but driving 50 meters was bad for the engine, the battery and the planet. it then recommended me to push the car, if safe.

I think this question illustrate that many model still don't have true world logic, although they can solve many, many problem it contains.

Also interestingly, the two models I tested didn't consider EVs.

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

#614

Post by selcuka »

bayindirh wrote: post #84
selcuka wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would not be a good question, because a non-negligible percentage of humans would give a similar answer.

That's a great opportunity for a controlled study! You should do it. If you can send me the draft publication after doing the study, I can give feedback on it.

I don't think there is a need for a new study as Cognitive Reflection Tests are a well-researched subject [1]. I am actually surprised that I got downvoted, as I thought this would be common knowledge.

[1] https://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych466/articles/Fred...

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

#615

Post by Departed7405 »

nicbou wrote: post #321
jstummbillig wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…

I get that issue constantly. I somehow can't get any LLM to ask me clarifying questions before spitting out a wall of text with incorrect assumptions. I find it particularly frustrating.

I use models with OpenRouter, and only have this models with OpenAI models. That's why I don't use them.

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

#616

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#617

Post by AstroBen »

jaccola wrote: post #20

All of the latest models I've tried actually pass this test. What I found interesting was all of the success cases were similar to: e.g. "Drive. Most car washes require the car to be present to wash,..." Only most?! They have an inability to have a strong "opinion" probably because their post training, and maybe the internet in general, prefer hedged answers....

They pass it because it went viral a week ago and has been patched

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

#618

Post by gen220 »

polarbearballs wrote: post #539
ninjagoo wrote: post #234

I wonder if the providers are doing everyone, themselves included, a huge disservice by providing free versions of their models that are so incompetent compared to the SOTA models that these types of q&a go viral because the ai hype doesn't match the reality for unpaid users. And it's not just the viral questions that are an issue. I've seen people getting sub-optimal results for $1000+ PC comparisons from the free r…

I have paid versions of Chat-GPT and Anthropic and set them both to the best model and they both told me to walk. Claude told me: "Walk! At 25 meters, you'd barely get the car started before you arrived. It's faster and easier on foot — plus you avoid the awkwardness of driving a dirty car just a few seconds down the road."

I opened up a claude code session using opus-4.6 medium thinking.

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

Drive — you need the car at the car wash.

but it's so close

It is close, but you still need the car there to wash it! Drive it over, and enjoy the short 50-meter walk back if you want to stretch your legs while it's being cleaned.

I tried the "upside-down" cup question brought up in another comment in this thread, and it also nailed it:

Flip it upside down. The sealed top becomes the bottom (holding your drink), and the open bottom becomes the top you drink from.

IDK, maybe the web versions are not as good at logical reasoning as whatever they're using to power Claude code, or you were unlucky and I was lucky?

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

#619

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dirkc wrote: post #512
jstummbillig wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…

> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn. But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember pro…

>> Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn.

Like a programming language? But that's the whole point of LLMs, that you can give instructions to a computer using natural language, not a formal language. That's what makes those systems "AI", right? Because you can talk to them and they seem to understand what you're saying, and then reply to you and you can understand what they're saying without any special training. It's AI! Like the Star Trek[1] computer!

The truth of course is that as soon as you want to do something more complicated than a friendly chat you find that it gets harder and harder to communicate what it is you want exactly. Maybe that's because of the ambiguity of natural language, maybe it's because "you're prompting it wrong", maybe it's because the LLM doesn't really understand anything at all and it's just a stochastic parrot. Whatever the reason, at that point you find yourself wishing for a less ambiguous way of communication, maybe a formal language with a full spec and a compiler, and some command line flags and debug tokens etc... and at that point it's not a wonderful AI anymore but a Good, Old-Fashioned Computer, that only does what you want if you can find exactly the right way to say it. Like asking a Genie to make your wishes come true.

______________

[1] TNG duh.

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

#620

Post by billnad »

Gemini 3 Flash gave me a fun answer!

Since your goal is to wash the car, you should definitely drive it there.

As an IT guy, you can think of it like this: walking to the car wash is like remoting into a server to run a script, but forgetting to include the actual data payload. You'll arrive at the destination, but you won't have the "hardware" present to perform the intended task!

Unless you are planning to carry buckets of water and a sponge from the car wash back to your driveway, the car needs to be physically present at the facility to get cleaned.

Drive the 50 meters—it'll be the shortest commute of your day!

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