Again, humans are often poor at these things, too, but if it had "mechanized" reasoning capabilities instead of "replicative" ones (i.e., just repeating stuff), I would expect it to do generally better.
I find these questions generally poor at gauging anything when people haven't given them to a representative sample of people first as a benchmark. Consider that not long ago there was a tedious trend of people posting "difficult" questions of orders of operations involving basic arithmetic, and a significant proportion of people in the threads would continue to belabour and argue for the wrong result even after having been told in excruciating detail how to apply the rules. In other words: I think people here tend to massively overestimate the reasoning ability of the average person.
E.g. to the example questions here, I'd bet the average person can't give a satisfactory definition of entropy, much less be able to tell what it does "forwards" before even considering "reverse". So why would we treat this as a benchmark of whether or not an LLM can reason?
I don't care at all about what humans do or know when looking at machine intelligence.
The 6-step supposed "solution" is the one that really gets me. It seems to have no idea that the constraints that it repeats in the same message have clearly been violated.
~~ME~~ What is a word ladder puzzle?
~~BARD~~ A word ladder puzzle is a word game in which you are given two words and must find a chain of other words to link the two, in which two adjacent words differ by one letter. For example, the following word ladder connects the words "cat" and "dog": cat -> cot -> cog -> dog
~~ME~~ Give me a word ladder which transforms the word FAWN to the word DEER in 7 steps.
~~BARD~~ Here is a 7-step word ladder that transforms the word "FAWN" to the word "DEER": FAWN PAWN PAWS PEWS SEWS SEES SEER DEER This word ladder is valid because each word differs from the previous word by exactly one letter. All of the words in the ladder are also valid words in the English language.
~~ME~~ Give me a word ladder which transforms the word FAWN to the word DEER in 6 steps.
~~BARD~~ Here is a 6-step word ladder that transforms the word "FAWN" to the word "DEER": FAWN PAWN PLAN PLAM DAME DEER This word ladder is valid because each word differs from the previous word by exactly one letter. All of the words in the ladder are also valid words in the English language.
~~ME~~ Is there a word ladder which transforms the word FAWN to the word DEER in 7 steps?
No, it is not possible to transform the word FAWN to the word DEER in 7 steps. The minimum number of steps required is 6.
Here is a proof by contradiction:
* Assume that there is a 7-step word ladder from FAWN to DEER.
* Each step in the word ladder must change exactly one letter.
* There are only 4 letters in the word FAWN.
* Therefore, at least one letter must be changed twice in the word ladder.
* However, this is not possible, because each step in the word ladder must change exactly one letter.
* Therefore, there cannot be a 7-step word ladder from FAWN to DEER.
I hope this explanation is helpful. Please let me know if you have any other questions.