Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper – and why they fall short

Re:Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper – and wh... by dfawcus on Sunday June 15, 2025 @10:34AM (#44282484)

Maybe they can, but what the human is able to do is examine the tower of Hanoi problem, and the derive the general rule for solving (odd or even number of disks).

Based upon that comprehension, we then need little working memory (tokens) to solve the problem, it just becomes tedious to execute the algorithm.. But the algorithm was derived after considering the first 3 or 4 cases.

Whereas for the moment, LLMS are just pattern matching; whereas we do the pattern match, then derive the generalised rule.

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Re:Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper – and wh... by saberience on Sunday June 15, 2025 @11:06AM (#44282675)

LLMs do that too though lol.

The Tower of Hanoi problem is terrible example for somehow suggesting humans are superior.

Firstly, there are plenty of humans who can’t solve this problem even for 3 disks, let alone 6 or 7. Secondly, LLMs can both give you general instructions to solve for any case and they can write out exhaustive move lists too.

Anyway, the fact that there are humans who cannot do Tower of Hanoi already rules it out as a good test of general intelligence anyway. We don’t say that a human doesn’t have “general intelligence” if they cannot solve Towers of Hanoi, so why then would it be a good test for LLM general intelligence?

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