You know, despite not really believing LLM “intelligence” works anywhere like real intelligence, I kind of thought maybe being good at recognizing patterns was a way to emulate it to a point…
But that study seems to prove they’re still not even good at that. At first I was wondering how hard the puzzles must have been, and then there’s a bit about LLM finishing 100 move towers of Hanoï (on which they were trained) and failing 4 move river crossings. Logically, those problems are very similar… Also, failing to apply a step-by-step solution they were given.
This paper doesn’t prove that LLMs aren’t good at pattern recognition, it demonstrates the limits of what pattern recognition alone can achieve, especially for compositional, symbolic reasoning.
Computers are awesome at “recognizing patterns” as long as the pattern is a statistical average of some possibly worthless data set. And it really helps if the computer is setup to ahead of time to recognize pre-determined patterns.
You know, despite not really believing LLM “intelligence” works anywhere like real intelligence, I kind of thought maybe being good at recognizing patterns was a way to emulate it to a point…
But that study seems to prove they’re still not even good at that. At first I was wondering how hard the puzzles must have been, and then there’s a bit about LLM finishing 100 move towers of Hanoï (on which they were trained) and failing 4 move river crossings. Logically, those problems are very similar… Also, failing to apply a step-by-step solution they were given.
This paper doesn’t prove that LLMs aren’t good at pattern recognition, it demonstrates the limits of what pattern recognition alone can achieve, especially for compositional, symbolic reasoning.
Computers are awesome at “recognizing patterns” as long as the pattern is a statistical average of some possibly worthless data set. And it really helps if the computer is setup to ahead of time to recognize pre-determined patterns.