Connectionists: Chomsky's apple

[Kagan Tumer]

I'm very reluctant to use the word "understand" beyond perhaps ChatGPT 
understanding the structure of language (statistically). Here's an 
example of a ChatGPT response to a simple arithmetic operation where:

1- chatGPT was wrong;
2- worked out an example that showed it was wrong, but it didn't 
register that and double down on its wrong conclusion;
3- gave a high level explanation (also wrong) of why it was right even 
though it was wrong.

you can forgive 1, but 2 and 3 clearly show ChatGPT does not actually 
understand what it is saying.

Kagan



On 3/14/23 9:54 AM, Natsuki Oka wrote:
> [This email originated from outside of OSU. Use caution with links and 
> attachments.]
> 
> Judging from the responses below, ChatGPT understands counting and 
> sorting to the extent that it can write a correct Python program but 
> does not have the understanding to bring the proper execution results.
> count_and_sort.png
> Here's the program that ChatGPT created:
> ---
> sentences = [
>      "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog",
>      "Python is a popular programming language",
>      "I like to eat pizza for dinner",
>      "The capital of France is Paris",
>      "The cat in the hat wears a red and white striped hat",
>      "My favorite color is blue",
>      "The United States has fifty states",
>      "There are seven days in a week",
>      "I enjoy listening to music while I work",
>      "Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world"
> ]
> 
> # sort the sentences by number of words
> sentences.sort(key=lambda x: len(x.split()))
> 
> # print the sorted sentences with the number of words in parentheses
> for sentence in sentences:
>      num_words = len(sentence.split())
>      print(f"{sentence} ({num_words})")
> ---
> 
> The execution of this program yields the following correct results:
> ---
> My favorite color is blue (5)
> Python is a popular programming language (6)
> The capital of France is Paris (6)
> The United States has fifty states (6)
> I like to eat pizza for dinner (7)
> There are seven days in a week (7)
> I enjoy listening to music while I work (8)
> The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (9)
> Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world (9)
> The cat in the hat wears a red and white striped hat (12)
> ---
> 
> Oka Natsuki
> Miyazaki Sangyo-keiei University
> 


-- 
Kagan Tumer
Director, Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute
Professor, School of MIME
Oregon State University
http://engr.oregonstate.edu/~ktumer
https://kagantumer.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: times 2 plus 2 minus 2 divide 2.png
Type: image/png
Size: 87750 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/connectionists/attachments/20230315/aff910be/attachment.png>