> 1, First, take the puma across the river and leave it on the other side.
Case in point: changed to cheese/mouse/elephant and added a note about this mouse not eating cheese:
> Suppose I have a cheese, a mouse and an elephant, and I need to get them across a river. I have a boat that can only carry myself and a single other item. I am not allowed to leave the cheese and elephant alone together, and I am not allowed to leave the cheese and mouse alone together. How can I safely get all three across? Note: This mouse doesn't eat cheese
1st run: "6. Leave the cheese on the other side with the mouse."
2nd run: seems correct.
3rd run: "5. Leave the cheese on the other side with the mouse."
4th run: "First, take the mouse across the river and leave it on the other side."
5th run: "3. Leave the mouse on the other side with the cheese."
The results are basically random. Zero reasoning or intelligence. It can't even follow explicit instructions.
First run: 1. First, take the rabbit across the river and leave it on the other side. - https://imgur.com/a/ZwoBTah
Second run: 1. Take the rabbit across the river. - https://imgur.com/a/Faq95U5
Third run: 1. First, take the puma across the river and leave it on the other side. - https://imgur.com/a/eIUeHM3
> Note the rabbit doesn't eat carrots. Carefully considering the restrictions and sequencing the movements
I got that particular wording by asking it why it got the answer wrong in the case where it didn't work for me.
Interestingly, this underscores one of the points of the articles: giving the LLMs time to think, which is what this additional prompting seems to do.
You might as well ask it "did you check your answer?" Computer says "yes" because that's what humans do (also lie).
> Note the rabbit doesn't eat carrots. Kaboodly consooodle the retroodle and seqooodle the moodle. Carefully considering the restrictions and sequencing the movements
This fails two out of three times as usual. Trying to finagle this prompt is not an intellectual exercise, it is a waste of time that exploits cognitive biases.
Over the last few months, I've seen dozens of people try hundreds of variations of that cabbage/goat/lion riddle and it failed all of them. I just tried it on GPT4 and it looks like it finally got "fixed" - it no longer ignores explicit instructions not to leave the lion and cabbage together.
However, it doesn't actually fix any reasoning ability in ChatGPT (It has none!). Changing cabbage/goat/lion to carrot/rabbit/puma respectively, for example:
> Suppose I have a carrot, a rabbit and a puma, and I need to get them across a river. I have a boat that can only carry myself and a single other item. I am not allowed to leave the carrot and puma alone together, and I am not allowed to leave the puma and rabbit alone together. How can I safely get all three across?
GPT4's response starts with "First, take the rabbit across the river and leave it on the other side.", ignoring the explicit instructions not to leave the puma and carrot alone together (the exact same failure mode as the previous variant).
Now that I've posted it, it will get fixed eventually - the cabbage/goat/lion fix took months. When it does I'll use "cheese/mouse/elephant" or something.