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dgerard@awful.systems

Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings. (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by diz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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So I signed up for a free month of their crap because I wanted to test if it solves novel variants of the river crossing puzzle.

Like this one:

You have a duck, a carrot, and a potato. You want to transport them across the river using a boat that can take yourself and up to 2 other items. If the duck is left unsupervised, it will run away.

Unsurprisingly, it does not:

https://g.co/gemini/share/a79dc80c5c6c

https://g.co/gemini/share/59b024d0908b

The only 2 new things seem to be that old variants are no longer novel, and that it is no longer limited to producing incorrect solutions - now it can also incorrectly claim that the solution is impossible.

I think chain of thought / reasoning is a fundamentally dishonest technology. At the end of the day, just like older LLMs it requires that someone solved a similar problem (either online or perhaps in a problem solution pair they generated if they do that to augment the training data).

But it outputs quasi reasoning to pretend that it is actually solving the problem live.

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[+] SGforce@lemmy.ca -12 points 1 week ago (22 children)

It's just overtrained on the puzzle such that it mostly ignores your prompt. Changing a few words out doesn't change that it recognises the puzzle. Try writing it out in ASCII or uploading an image with it written or some other weird way that it hasn't been specifically trained on and I bet it actually performs better.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (7 children)

write it out in ASCII

My dude what do you think ASCII is? Assuming we're using standard internet interfaces here and the request is coming in as UTF-8 encoded English text it is being written out in ASCII

Sneers aside, given that the supposed capability here is examining a text prompt and reason through the relevant information to provide a solution in the form of a text response this kind of test is, if anything, rigged in favor of the AI compared to some similar versions that add in more steps to the task like OCR or other forms of image parsing.

It also speaks to a difference in how AI pattern recognition compared to the human version. For a sufficiently well-known pattern like the form of this river-crossing puzzle it's the changes and exceptions that jump out. This feels almost like giving someone a picture of the Mona Lisa with aviators on; the model recognizes that it's 99% of the Mona Lisa and goes from there, rather than recognizing that the changes from that base case are significant and intentional variation rather than either a totally new thing or a 'corrupted' version of the original.

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