[closetnerd]

What's most astounding is that it was expected to work when so much of the prompt just doesn't make sense:

> Objects should only move if they will end up on an empty tile after their move

> "An object is free to move onto a tile that another object moves onto if that other object is moving off of its tile"

[wbeckler]

If the issue was the prompt, I expect someone will prompt it with a better wording of the problem and get a decent algorithm, and post it in this conversation. Let's see what happens...

[hammyhavoc]

Repeat the experiment in a better way and blog about it then rather than negging in the comments. I'm not the author, but I'll await your peer review.

[closetnerd]

In the post, author says that the GPT-3 version it apparently worked well. Which is really is amazing to me.

The prompts really read in a way where I wouldn't have expected the "correct" output.

[joshka]

I'm not sure that the commenter was negging here but instead showing that the language used in the prompt was imprecise (in a similar way that we might get system requirements in reality). The takeaway I got was more that the commenter was showing surprise at how well that ambiguity was resolved regardless. A more interesting experiment to run might be to intentionally reduce the precision of the task e.g. something

    In a 10x10 arena, work out if there is a path shorter than 5 steps from one start to finish with water tiles taking two steps and avoiding as many fire tiles as possible.

But you can go even better than that really. The author jumps down to a more code oriented description too soon (10x10, etc.) but ChatGPT (3.5) does ok with just the original problem (I removed the text about A* and Djikstra's from the english version of the problem statement:

PROMPT:

In Mewgenics, movement abilities use pathfinding to get the cat from his origin to his destination.

Cats have a maximum movement range stat and tiles have a cost (in this case its 1 for basic tiles and 9999 for blocking obstacles). We also have water tiles that cost 2 to path through.

The complication comes in when we add Fire (and other hazard type tiles) into the mix. Fire tiles don’t cost extra to pathfind through like water tiles do, however a cat really wants to avoid pathing through the fire tile if it can. If there’s a lot of fire tiles it should go through the least number of them it can.

ANSWER:

To solve this problem, you can modify the pathfinding algorithm to take into account the hazard tiles, such as fire. One way to achieve this is by using a modified A* algorithm.

First, assign a high cost to hazard tiles such as fire. This cost should be higher than the cost of regular tiles, but lower than the cost of blocking obstacles. For example, you can assign a cost of 5 to fire tiles.

Next, modify the heuristic function used in the A* algorithm to take into account the distance from the hazard tiles. For example, you can modify the Euclidean distance heuristic to add an extra term that takes into account the distance from the closest hazard tile. The closer the cat is to a hazard tile, the higher the heuristic value should be.

Finally, when selecting the next tile to visit, prioritize tiles with the lowest total cost (including both the movement cost and the heuristic cost), but also consider the number of hazard tiles that the cat would need to pass through to reach that tile. You can add an extra penalty term to the total cost that increases based on the number of hazard tiles the cat would need to pass through to reach the tile. This penalty term should be high enough to discourage the cat from pathing through too many hazard tiles.

With these modifications, the cat should be able to find the shortest path to its destination while avoiding hazard tiles as much as possible.