TechTakes

1745 readers

45 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[+] [email protected] -11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

I just asked the same question to my preferred onprem model, Mistral-Small 3.1.

13s on a 7900xtx

justinledwards/mistral-small-3.1-Q6_K:latest

To successfully transport the duck, carrot, and potato across the river without losing any of them, you need to plan your trips carefully. Here’s a step-by-step strategy:

First Trip: Take the duck across the river first.

Items on this side: Carrot, Potato
Items on the other side: Duck

Return Trip: Go back alone to the original side.

Items on this side: Carrot, Potato (you)
Items on the other side: Duck

Second Trip: Take either the carrot or the potato across the river.

Let's say you take the carrot first for illustration.

Items on this side: Potato
Items on the other side: Duck, Carrot (you)

Return Trip: Go back with the duck to the original side.

Items on this side: Potato, Duck
Items on the other side: Carrot

Third Trip: Leave the duck behind and take the potato across the river.

Items on this side: Duck
Items on the other side: Carrot, Potato (you)

Return Trip: Go back alone to get the duck.

Items on this side: Duck (you)
Items on the other side: Carrot, Potato

Final Trip: Take the duck across the river. All items are now on the other side.

By following these steps, you ensure that the duck is never left unsupervised and all items make it safely across the river.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

While all the comments are correct, i.e. what the fuck is wrong with you, this is also wrong since it immediately leaves the duck unsupervised after the first trip. So really not sure what you're trying to prove here.

load more comments (3 replies)