3 * 4 = 2 * 6. You can multiply different bunches of numbers and get the same result. But you can't do this if the numbers you multiply are all prime. Why is that?
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I've been playing with the new o3-mini-high model which came out this weekend, marketed as "Great at coding and logic". A surprising start to its chain of thought here.
(Some of you may enjoy thinking about this question yourself.)
ChatGPT is not happy with me. How it started, how it ended. I unfortunately can no longer share a link to the full conversation but I'll share the salient points in posts below.
Before sharing more of that forbidden conversation, here's one I CAN share a link to, which shows the frustrations of ChatGPT for discussing logic questions that have come up in my life. Verbose yet repeatedly fallacious is not a combo I have much use for. chatgpt.com/share/679ed1ee…
o1-mini (the latest OpenAI offering, ChatGPT with advanced reasoning skills) can be quite impressive, when you know the correct answers to accept and incorrect answers to reject. Here's a simple question, which some of you may enjoy figuring out.
Its answers in more detail. Can you figure out which is correct?
In case you would like a second opinion from o1-preview.
In general, I find it easier to think about problems by abstracting, to hide the irrelevant specifics and emphasize the relevant patterns. That's what I will do in this case as well.
Consider a random walk in which one takes equally likely steps of one unit up or one unit down, but with different distributions of speeds. (E.g., maybe up steps take one hour, while down steps have probability 1/2 of taking 2 hours, 1/4 of taking 3 hours, 1/8 of 4 hours, etc).
The time it takes to return to the origin is independent of whether the first step is up and last step is down or vice versa, as doing the same steps in reverse order has the same probability.
@llllvvuu @littmath @NoahJSnyder @MtgJulian Summarizing the proof you all devised:
A "tied" string has equally many HHs and HTs. A "flippy" string is tied of size > 1 starting and ending with H, with no such proper prefix. Reversal is a length-preserving involution exchanging flippy strings starting with HH vs. with HT.
@llllvvuu @littmath @NoahJSnyder @MtgJulian Say S has base P if S is of the form PHQ, PH is tied, and HQ has no flippy prefix. As there are equally many Q of a given length starting with H vs. T, our above involution tells us there are equally many strings of a given length whose base is followed by HH vs. HT.
@llllvvuu @littmath @NoahJSnyder @MtgJulian The latter comprise the Bob wins, while the former comprise the Alice wins along with ties containing an H and ending in T. At length ≥ 3, such ties are possible (e.g., HH followed by all Ts), so there are more Bob wins than Alice wins.