When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

Exactly. Even if you ensure the cited cases or articles are real it will misrepresent what said articles say.

Fundamentally it is just blah blah blah ing until the point comes when a citation would be likely to appear, then it blah blah blahs the citation based on the preceding text that it just made up. It plain should not be producing real citations. That it can produce real citations is deeply at odds with it being able to pretend at reasoning, for example.

Ensuring the citation is real, RAG-ing the articles in there, having AI rewrite drafts, none of these hacks do anything to address any of the underlying problems.

Yeah. I’d love to see the prompt, gab’s nazi ai prompt was utterly pathetic and this one got to be pretty bad as well.

Actually, having read it carefully, it is interesting that they actually don’t claim it was hacked, they claim that the modification was unauthorized. They also don’t claim that they removed the access from that mysterious “employee” who modified it. I’m thinking they had some legal reason to technically not lie.

It re consumes its own bullshit, and the bullshit it does print is the bullshit it also fed itself, its not lying about that. Of course, it is also always re consuming the initial prompt too so the end bullshit isn’t necessarily quite as far removed from the question as the length would indicate.

Where it gets deceptive is when it knows an answer to the problem, but it constructs some bullshit for the purpose of making you believe that it solved the problem on its own. The only way to tell the difference is to ask it something simpler that it doesn’t know the answer to, and watch it bullshit in circles or to an incorrect answer.

I think they worked specifically on cheating the benchmarks, though. As well as popular puzzles like pre existing variants of the river crossing - it is a very large puzzle category, very popular, if the river crossing puzzle is not on the list I don’t know what would be.

Keep in mind that they are also true believers, too - they think that if they cram enough little pieces of logical reasoning, taken from puzzles, into the AI, then they will get robot god that will actually start coming up with new shit.

I very much doubt that there’s some general reasoning performance improvement that results in these older puzzle variants getting solved, while new ones that aren’t particularly more difficult, fail.

Did you use any of that kind of notation in the prompt? Or did some poor squadron of task workers write out a few thousand examples of this notation for river crossing problems in an attempt to give it an internal structure?

I didn’t use any notation in the prompt, but gemini 2.5 pro seem to always represent state of the problem after every step in some way. When asked if it does anything with it says it is “very important”, so it may be that there’s some huge invisible prompt that says its very important to do this.

It also mentioned N cannibals and M missionaries.

My theory is that they wrote a bunch of little scripts that generate puzzles and solutions in that format. Since river crossing is one of the top most popular puzzles, it would be on the list (and N cannibals M missionaries is easy to generate variants of), although their main focus would have been the puzzles in the benchmarks that they are trying to cheat.

edit: here’s one of the logs:

https://pastebin.com/GKy8BTYD

Basically it keeps on trying to brute force the problem. It gets first 2 moves correct, but in a stopped clock style manner - if there’s 2 people and 1 boat they both take the boat, if there’s 2 people and >=2 boats, then each of them takes a boat.

It keeps doing the same shit until eventually its state tracking fails, or its reading of the state fails, and then it outputs the failure as a solution. Sometimes it deems it impossible:

https://pastebin.com/Li9quqqd

All tests done with gemini 2.5 pro, I can post links if you need them but links don’t include their “thinking” log and I also suspect that if >N people come through a link they just look at it. Nobody really shares botshit unless its funny or stupid. A lot of people independently asking the same problem, that would often happen if there’s a new homework question so they can’t use that as a signal so easily.

Yeah I think the best examples are everyday problems that people solve all the time but don’t explicitly write out solutions step by step for, or not in the puzzle-answer form.

It’s not even a novel problem at all, I’m sure there’s even a plenty of descriptions of solutions to it as part of stories and such. Just not as “logical puzzles” due to triviality.

What really annoys me is when they claim high performance on benchmarks consisting of fairly difficult problems. This is basically fraud, since they know full well it is still entirely “knowledge” reliant, and even take steps to augment it with generated problems and solutions.

I guess the big sell is that it could use bits and pieces of logic gleaned from other solutions to solve a “new” problem. Except it can not.

And it is Google we’re talking about, lol. If no one uses their AI shit they just replace something people use with it (also see search).

It’s google though, if nobody uses their shit they just put it inside their search.

It’s only gonna go away when they run out of cash.

edit: whoops replied to the wrong comment

Yeah, exactly. There’s no trick to it at all, unlike the original puzzle.

I also tested OpenAI’s offerings a few months back with similarly nonsensical results: https://awful.systems/post/1769506

All-vegetables no duck variant is solved correctly now, but I doubt it is due to improved reasoning as such, I think they may have augmented the training data with some variants of the river crossing. The river crossing is one of the top most known puzzles, and various people have been posting hilarious bot failures with variants of it. So it wouldn’t be unexpected that their training data augmentation has river crossing variants.

Of course, there’s very many ways in which the puzzle can be modified, and their augmentation would only cover obvious stuff like variation on what items can be left with what items or spots on the boat.