I'm trying to explain a sentence to gpt-3.5

Prompting
1

Using the Chat endpoint, I wanted to make gpt reason in a particular way.
This was just an experiment, there’s no real application to why I want it to do this.
Here’s how it went…

  1. There is a second moon.
  2. There is a small second moon.
  3. There is a second smaller moon.
  4. There is a smaller second moon.
  5. There is a second small moon.

  • Sentences 1-4 imply that there are now two moons in the sky.

  • Sentence 5 could be interpreted to refer to a situation where there is already our moon, one additional small moon, and now there is a second small moon.

I just can’t seem to get gpt to reason that way.

  • Have I hit a limit?
  • Are my prompts just dumb?
  • BYO question

I’ll put the system message and some sample responses in a comment.

2

First try

System

These sentences are in the context of additional moons appearing in the night sky.
Based on the sentence, reply only with how many moons are now in the night sky.
Explain your thinking step by step.

t=1; max_len=256; top_p=1; 0; 0;

Inputs

GPT responses

  • There is a second moon.

There are now two moons in the night sky. This is indicated by the phrase “second moon.”

  • There is a second small moon.

There are two moons in the night sky.
The sentence mentions a “second small moon,” indicating that there is already a moon present and now there is an additional one. Therefore, there are two moons in the night sky.

  • There is a second small moon.

There are now two moons in the night sky. The sentence says “a second small moon,” indicating that a second moon has appeared. Since there was already one moon, the addition of the second moon means that there are now two moons in the night sky.

  • There is a second smaller moon.

There are now 2 moons in the night sky. This sentence indicates that a second smaller moon has appeared.

3

I do not see any ambiguity in those statements that would lead to there being a 3rd moon.

4

Agree.

Given the corpus of text GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have been trained on—the wild Internet, rife with spelling and grammatical errors—it’s easy to imagine (5) as being read,

There is a second small moon.
There is a second, small, moon.

Or, it could be implying the already existing moon is “small.” I wouldn’t make the leap to thinking the second “small” moon was actually the third total moon unless the existence of a first “small” moon distinct from the original moon had already been established or—stretching—that the original moon is not “small.”

1 Like
5

Hola cómo estás, mi nombre es Randy

6

I think you are looking for ChatGPT, you can find it over at https://chat.openai.com

7

Asking ChatGPT 4 to spell out it’s reasoning implies that it considered the case of 3 moons but selected the version with 2 as more likely.

https://chat.openai.com/share/0fbf4b0d-57e7-489f-a56c-4888ce82e6bb

1 Like
8

Yes! It is rejecting that idea outright in my prompts, but it is managing to interpret the statement in the way I was envisioning…

Curious. Thanks!

9

I loaded the AI up with physics to make its determination, but it still concedes the ambiguity of silly words:

Based on the analysis of these statements, we can conclude that the system has at least two moons. The size of the moons is mentioned in some of the statements, but the exact number of moons cannot be determined solely from these statements.

Hill spheres, gravity wells, n-body stability, and orbital dynamics provide valuable insights into the behavior and stability of multi-body systems, but in this case, the statements themselves only hint at the presence of multiple moons without providing enough information to precisely determine their numbers or orbital dynamics.