hedgehog

Did he implement two different variations? OP said he used two different tools, not that his solutions were any different.

That said… how so?

There are many different ways two different brute force approaches might vary.

A naive search and a search with optimizations that narrow the search area (e.g., because certain criteria are known and thus don’t need to be iterated over) can both be brute force solutions.

You could also just change the search order to get a different variation. In this case, we have customer, price, meat, cheese, and we need to build a combination of those to get our solution; the way you construct that can also vary.

The comparison to your SO’s approach is a bit sloppy. He didn’t reason out a solution himself; he wrote a program to solve the puzzle.

How do you define “reasoning?” Maybe your definition is different than mine. My experience is that there is a certain amount of reasoning going on, even with non-reasoning LLMs. Being able to answer “What is the capital of the state that has Houston in it?” for example, is something I would classify as very basic reasoning. And now, LLM-powered chat bots are much more capable.

All that “reasoning” or “thinking” really is, though, is a way to get additional semantic connections in place without:

• giving an answer in the wrong format
• filling up context with noise

There are limits to how well reasoning these char bots can reason. One of those limits is specifically related to the context size. As the context becomes larger, the model’s capabilities become worse. By asking it to show all its work, you exacerbated that weakness.

That still doesn’t mean LLM-powered chat bots can’t reason, just that there are limits.

I used to do puzzle books with these sorts of problems when I was younger, and they always came with multiple sets of grids with row and column labels filled out to facilitate the elimination approach. I don’t know that most people would think “Hey, it would be helpful to build a grid for each way of setting up these constraints.” One grid, sure, but I don’t think one grid is sufficient for this sort of problem.

I don’t think I am - or that most people are, for that matter - capable of reasoning through all of the necessary steps in my head and aloud, without use of, at minimum, pencil and paper. I hope you wouldn’t say that I and most people aren’t capable of reasoning as a result.

I just asked Claude Opus 4 (with extended thinking and analysis tools enabled) “Given the freedom to use any tools of your choice, design an approach to solve this problem. Feel free to use any tools that are necessary, including writing code in a language of your choice.” followed by pasting your problem text. It wrote and ran some code to solve it, gave me an answer that violated constraint 7, and when I pointed that out, ran some more code and gave me a correct solution on its second attempt.

You are absolutely correct. I apologize for the error. Let me revise the solution to ensure constraint 7 is satisfied.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thank you for catching that error. Here is the corrected solution that satisfies all nineteen constraints:

Final Solution:

The key correction was recognizing that since ham cannot be paired with swiss cheese (constraint 7), and Henrietta must have swiss cheese based on the process of elimination, Henrietta cannot have ham. Through careful analysis of the remaining constraints, I determined that Carol has ham with her colby jack cheese, which satisfies all requirements.

This solution demonstrates the importance of thorough verification when solving complex constraint satisfaction problems. Even when a solution appears complete, each constraint must be individually validated to ensure accuracy.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This all took 5-10 minutes - and most of that time was spent verifying its solutions - so a third of the time your SO took.

LLMs, even those with image analysis abilities, are lacking when it comes to spatial awareness, so your critique regarding using a grid to implement a systematic elimination approach is valid.

What’s been stopping them?

A big part of the reason that Republicans are more able to pass legislation is that smaller states have a larger impact than they should, based on their populations.

Each state has a number of members in the House of Representatives in proportion to their population - 52 for California. Each state has two members in the Senate, so CA has the same amount of power in the Senate as Wyoming, which has a population of under 600k to CA’s 39 million.

Beyond the impact on Congress, the sum of those counts determines the number of electoral votes a state has in presidential elections. So California has 54 electoral college votes.

If California split up into 12 different states, each would end up with 6 electoral votes. The total count in the House would decrease from 52 to 48, and some other state would get the remaining 4 (though even that could be avoided by just having some sub-states be large enough to get 5 Representatives) but the total count of Senators would increase from 2 to 24 and the total electoral vote count would increase from 54 to 72.

Many of the smallest US states are firmly red, which means Republicans don’t need as much popular support to make policy changes. This would help reverse that. Heck, if California went all the way and split into 65 states, each with the population of Wyoming, they’d end up with 195 electoral college votes.

I feel like the US would take over California again if that was the case.

I’m not sure how you think the US would take over CA again, or what the impact would be, if it continued to be part of the US and just split into several different states. Could you elaborate?

I’d much rather California split into 12 different states, each with roughly the population of Nevada.

No offense taken, but thanks for the comment! If someone was offended and they saw your comment, I think it would probably help

I thought it was like the way one's brain is wired that causes them to have slightly different perception than the rest.

I’m no expert, either, but this is a solid explanation IMO. It’s why autistic people are prone to sensory overload; their brains don’t filter out noise (like the hum of the refrigerator, the sounds of people chewing, or background conversations) the way that most allistic people’s brains do. It also definitely could have been the reason, or at least contributed to, why the woman from your post was confused - particularly if she was trying to figure out why allistic people did something.

Sorry, that’s incorrect.

Autism is commonly comorbid with mental health disorders (aka “mental illnesses”) like anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc., as well as with intellectual developmental disorders, but autism is still considered, at worst, a neurodevelopmental disorder, regardless of where an individual falls on the spectrum.

Both the DSM-V and ICD-11 are in agreement about this, for what that’s worth, but you could also just do a search for “Is autism a mental illness?” on Duckduckgo, Kagi, Searx, Bing, Google, or whatever, if you want to confirm.

The lady was autistic if I remember collectly. She had a boyfriend who also had a mental ilness.

Autism isn’t a mental illness.

Copyright applies to unfinished works, too. There are many reasons it might not protect an unfinished work, but those reasons are still relevant even for finished works.

If someone steals your physical drawing, that’s theft. If they take a picture of it, then use the picture - or your picture + modifications - without your permission, particularly in a commercial work, then that’s copyright infringement, but not theft. If they steal your physical drawing and then take a picture and so on, then it’s both theft and copyright infringement.

Most likely this wasn’t considered copyright infringement because the allegedly copied art isn’t copyrightable, e.g., game mechanics; or the plaintiff didn’t own the copyrights themselves and thus couldn’t sue (possibly the arts were still copyrighted by the original artists, having never been purchased; possibly they were stock assets that were re-purchased by the defendant). There are any number of reasons. However, “the work wasn’t published” isn’t one of them.

On the other hand, it’s quite likely they were able to sue for theft of trade secrets for that very reason. And they might have chosen to do that simply because proving copyright infringement is much more difficult.

This happened because the developers allegedly used assets from a game called P3, which was never released, and therefore not subject to copyright infringement claims.

That isn’t how copyright works. Copyright is awarded upon creation of a work, not upon release.

What a misleading, clickbait title:

Mozilla moves away from open source

When the author really meant:

Mozilla does a thing I don’t like

Did you turn it off by using Invidious?