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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?

#621

Post by crazygringo »

yuters wrote: post #602
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…

GPT 5.2 when asked "How will the car get washed if I don't drive it there?" grasped the reasoning, and then immediately forgot it. Fair point. Drive it there, obviously. Revised recommendation: drive 50 meters, wash it, then reward yourself by walking home like an eco hero.

That's absolutely hilarious. It came so close.

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

#622

Post by user_7832 »

criemen wrote: post #423
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 sti…

And on the flip side, even without thinking, Gemini 3 flash preview got it right, with the nuance of the possibility of getting supplies from the place (which tbh I as a human first thought this was about when I opened this thread on HN).

> Since you are going to the car wash, the choice depends entirely on *how* you plan to wash the car:

### 1. Drive if: * *You are using a drive-through or self-service bay:* You obviously need the car there to wash it. * *You are dropping it off:* If you are leaving it for a professional detailing, you have to drive it there. * *The "50 meters" is on a busy road:* If you have to cross a major highway or there are no sidewalks, it’s safer to just drive the car over.

### 2. Walk if: * *You are just going to buy supplies:* If you have a bucket at home and just need to run over to buy soap or sponges to bring back to your driveway. * *You are checking the queue:* If you want to see if there is a long line before you commit to moving the car. * *You are meeting someone there:* If your car is already clean and you’re just meeting a friend who is washing theirs.

*The Verdict:* If you intend to get the car washed at that location, *drive.* Driving 50 meters is negligible for the engine, and it saves you a round trip of walking back to get the vehicle.

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

#623

Post by sjzhzhz »

dbdr wrote: post #601
WarmWash wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompting is definitely a skill, similar to "googling" in the mid 00's. You see people complaining about LLM ability, and then you see their prompt, and it's the 2006 equivalent of googling "I need to know where I can go for getting the fastest service for car washes in Toronto that does wheel washing too"

Ironically, the phrase that was a bad 2006 google query is a decent enough LLM prompt, and the good 2006 google query (keywords only) would be a bad LLM prompt.

That’s not true at all. I get plenty of perfect responses with few word prompts often containing typos.

This isn’t always the case and depends on what you need.

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

#624

Post by zajio1am »

One could argue that answers given by LLMs make sense. By assuming reasonability of the asking side, the answering side could assume that both options are possible and use abductive reasoning to conclude that the car to wash is already at the car wash station (and the question is about using another car to drive there).

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

#625

Post by K0balt »

sathish316 wrote: post #612
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.c…

To be fair, we all have holes in our reasoning if we don’t carefully consider things and sometimes they are very surprising when they come to light. The dependency issue (need the car at the car wash) is an easy one that often trips up people at first glance too. (Left my phone at work, plan: take an uber to get to the office, walk to the couch and remember I don’t have my phone to call an uber)

Things like that are notorious points of failure in human reasoning. It’s not surprising that machines based on human behavior exhibit that trait as well, it would be surprising if they didn’t.

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

#626

Post by swat535 »

aswegs8 wrote: post #144
peterspath wrote: post #56

Grok 4.1: Drive. 50 meters is nothing — literally a 30-second walk or a 10-second drive — but the key point is: your car isn’t going to wash itself. If you walk to the car wash, you arrive alone. The car stays parked at home, still dirty. If you drive, the car actually gets to the car wash and gets cleaned. So unless you’re planning to push the car the whole way (which is technically possible but ridiculous), the onl…

Wow, Grok directly switches to LinkedIn mode. Interesting - not surprising. Car washing? Easy as pie.

I find Grok's "personality" hilarious, it sounds like a buffed up "chad" who is hitting its 100 bench rep while not breaking a sweat.

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

#627

Post by noisebrain »

I've used ChatGPT

Response:

Definitely by car

Even if it’s only 50 meters away, the whole point of a car wash is to wash the car, so taking it there on foot would be… complicated (and suspicious to the neighbors).

Now, seriously:

Distance: 50 meters is basically next door.

Time: by car it will literally take 10–15 seconds.

Effort: minimal.

Logic: the car needs to be there to be washed, so you have to drive it anyway.

The only reason to walk would be if you first want to check whether there’s a line or availability, and then come back for the car.

Pro tip: If you see it’s empty, take advantage immediately. Car washes tend to fill up quickly around midday.

Is it just an exterior wash, or interior as well?

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

#629

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #540
baxtr wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I don’t understand why LLMs don’t ask clarifying questions more often. In a real human to human conversation, you wouldn’t simply blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, you’d ask questions.

This is a great point, because when you ask it (Claude) if it has any questions, it often turns out it has lots of good ones! But it doesn't ask them unless you ask.

That's because it doesn't really have any questions until you ask it whether it does.

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

#630

Post by WarmWash »

conductr wrote: post #202
totetsu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is it about this specific question that puts it at the edges of what LLM can do? .. That, it's semantically leading to a certain type of discussion, so statistically .. that discussion of weighing pros and cons .. will be generated with high chance.. and the need of a logical model of the world to see why that discussion is pointless.. that is implicitly so easy to grasp for most humans that it goes un-state…

> that is implicitly so easy to grasp for most humans I feel like this is the trap. You’re trying to compare it to a human. Everyone seems to want to do that. But it’s quite simple to see LLMs are quite far still from being human. The can be convincing at the surface level but there’s a ton of nuance that just shouldn’t be expected. It’s a tool that’s been tuned and with that tuning some models will do better than ot…

>But it’s quite simple to see LLMs are quite far still from being human.

At this point I think it's a fair bet that whatever supersedes humans in intelligence, likely will not be human like. I think that their is this baked-in assumption that AGI only comes in human flavor, which I believe is almost certainly not the case.

To make an loose analogy, a bird looks at a drone an scoffs at it's inability to fly quietly or perch on a branch.

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