GPT4 math problem (says 7,735 is greater than 7,926)

Prompting
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Hey, I tried to use GPT4 to summarize some of the numbers I collected. Unfortunately, parts of the answer are wrong. GPT seems to think 7,735 is greater than 7,926, and 12,888,221 is greater than 14,289,259. Any tips on additional prompt settings I can use to make sure it doesn’t make this type of mistake again?

gpt4
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Hey champ!
And welcome to the community forum!
Use a calculator or ask it to write some code for you to sove the problem, chatGPT isn’t great at math :laughing:

If you’re interested I’ve written about it in more detail in this thread:

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Thanks! Much appreciated :slight_smile:

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Occasionally, it may still make math errors because it is a text model that does not know math – it only creates the illusion that it can do math well. Additionally, its behavior is probabilistic.

As I recall, for a limited number of users, there is a Wolfram|Alpha plugin for ChatGPT, which will definitely handle any math required.

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I think spelling out the procedure might help. I tried this, in which I forgot to do something smart after removing the leading minus sign, and yet this still seems to work for negative numbers:

First I’ll describe how to tell if one number is larger than another; then I’ll give you some pairs of numbers to compare.

To tell which of two numbers is greater:

  1. If both numbers are zero, then neither is greater.
  2. If one number has a leading minus sign and the other doesn’t, the other is greater.
  3. If neither (1) nor (2) gives you an answer, strip all characters from the numbers except numerical digits and the decimal point if any.
  4. For each number: strip any leading zeros before the other digits and the decimal point if any.
  5. For each number: if it has no decimal point, put a decimal point after its last digit.
  6. Then: if one number has more digits before the decimal point than the other, it is greater.
  7. If (4) doesn’t give you an answer then the number with the larger digit in the first non-equal position is greater.

Use the above procedure to report which number is greater:

0.0 or 0
9 or 23
-14 or -7
-00023.7 or -23.4
0001,000 or 1001
1.003 or 1.004
-27 or 0.002
7,735 or 7,926

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Would you mind trying to remove commas from numbers and see the results? I don’t know if that would be helpful, but it might be.

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