Me too, inquiring minds want to know! And a tangent of what is the
Nick-registered anthropic principle?
Like the answer to any question Nick asks is "whatever Nick thinks the
answer is, because he was the one who asked it"?
I'm guessing an inside "joke" between Nick and Jon from some
conversation few if any were present for?
I’m sorry if I missed it, but did Nick include the “explanation” by
which GPT “got” a number?
I could imagine a string of reasoning along the lines of:
— Nick intends to put this on FRIAM as a trick question
— Probably nobody would guess the number 1 as the next answer in the
sequence, so that must be the number Nick wants
— ergo: the next number in the sequence is 1. QED.
Was that the reasoning?
Eric
On Sep 11, 2025, at 0:57, Steve Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
Yes. Thank you. I was beginning to fear i had asked an unfair q.
Gpt got it on the first pass and then went on to say some
interesting things about mathematics and semantics
i think questions of this type *are* implicitly "unfair" (whatever
that means). Without attributing malice to Nick, it is of the type
of question known as "trick", either deliberately misleading
gesturing in an arbitrary (mis)direction or simply deliberately
obscuring/withholding context which might otherwisemake the question
"obvious".
I'm not a big fan of the whole domain of "trick questions" generally
up to and including highly respected (e.g. NYT) crossword puzzles,
"Trivial Pursuit" or "Jeapordy". This might seem odd as I *am* a
fan of esoteric knowledge... perhaps just not using it as tool for
"getting one over on others" (still not impugning Nick as having
intended such).
I do appreciate some of the responses here, including Glen's
meta-narrative and Nick's tease of "GPT nailed it right away!" though
that does have the taste of shaming the rest of us (as if GPT IS one
of us?) for not being as broadly trained on obscure facts and
patterns as GPT is?
Grumbling about "trick questions" aside, Nick's claim of:
"interesting things about mathematics and semantics" is compelling to
me. I can't help but want to know what that actually grounds out as?
I'm wondering if GPT calls this question out as a "category
ambiguity" (/ambiguity/ being.a subcategory of /error/)? I could
dive in with GPT and discuss these sequences and everyone's guesses,
etc... but despite my fascination with LLM-relations I don't want to
compound my already over/mis-use and speed the paving of the planet
with Data Centers beyond what I'm already doing with GPT. Like
noodling (yet) better/more-subtle methods for using natural materials
to build an a addition onto my home (just in time for a massive
data-center blob to grow, looming over the horizon, inevitably
sucking my humble adobe-abode into "the Matrix"?
- grumbleSteve
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