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by milemi 1183 days ago
"Bard is much worse than ChatGPT at solving an obscure word game I invented" would have been a more honest title, but would probably generate less clicks for the author.

Bard may still be much worse than ChatGPT at solving all kinds of puzzles, but the article is click bait for promoting the author's word game, not an actual investigation that warrants that conclusion.

2 comments

Having read through the word game, I agree with others that it's good that the game is less likely to be in the corpus. I think rhyming, while a challenging task, may be a poor benchmark for ability. The author doesn't seem to understand rhyming too well (cactus practice is a weak rhyme at best)

I completely disagree with the "hasty rhyming test" - Skeleton and Gelatin don't rhyme (-ton vs -tin), and rhyme worse than protein and poutine (-een vs --een).

> The author doesn't seem to understand rhyming too well (cactus practice is a weak rhyme at best)

cactus / practice ?

they rhyme to my mind

skeleton / gelatin ?

also rhyme to my ears

protein / poutine

also rhyme enough to be considered to rhyme

You appear to be operating under the impression that the every syllable of a rhyming couplet has to rhyme exactly for it to be considered a rhyme. This is an incorrect assumption. In fact, the above rhymes are arguably more pleasing because they are inexact rhymes rather than being exact forced rhymes.

In your world the only actual rhymes would be

bold / cold / gold

and

double / trouble / bubble

types of rhymes but the world considers the following to be perfectly acceptable

sent to meet her / centimetre

and so on

What most people consider a rhyme is that the vowel and coda of the last syllable match (of course we don't mostly reach for the technical definition).

I guess the examples there might be accent dependent. Protein/poutine is the only one of those first examples that really rhymes to me; skeleton/gelatin and cactus/practice both have different vowels. Maybe different for you though.

> What most people consider a rhyme is that the vowel and coda of the last syllable match

??? Oh yeah, says who?

protein / poutine

p[]oh teen / poo teen => both start with a p, then there's an oh or oo (which are similar) and both end the same way – disyllabic rhyme

cactus / practice ?

[]ah ck təss / []ah ck tiss => ignoring the first consonant (cluster) which anchors the rhyme and pronouncing the u as a schwa (which it is), the ck's are the same and təss and tiss are totes similar – disyllabic rhyme

skeleton / gelatin ?

trisyllabic goodness – again, the way we pronounce the on in first word is not like the on in frond but like the ən in motion (UHn) and the way we pronounce the at in the second word is not like the at in bat or cat but like the ət in … hmm, none spring to mind but it's an UHt sound here if you listen to it – sgɛ́lɪtən or ˈskelɪtən – ˈʤelətɪn – so you've k vying with g (both hard), e with e, l with l, ɪ with ə (close sounding!), t with t, ə with ɪ (close sounding!), n with n

===

listen with your ears, not with your eyes

Protein and poutine do not rhyme if you pronounce poutine the proper way in Canadian French.

And you are right of course that gelatin and practice have the short "ee" sound at the end whereas skeleton and and cactus have the "uh" sound.

> Protein and poutine do not rhyme if you pronounce poutine the proper way in Canadian French.

I looked it up, and sure, it sounds about the same in Canadian French as someone saying Vladimir Putin[1]. But I've never heard anyone say it that way myself, and in neutral French (according to the linked video, at least), it's pronounced 'pooh-teen', which sounds exactly like protein (I don't know if you pronounce protein different, but for me it's 'pro-teen').

[1]: https://youtu.be/yyis4TgmXYg

There's a funny restaurant called Vladimir Poutine in Montréal lol:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb7qwb/inside-vladimir-pouti...

> You appear to be operating under the impression that the every syllable of a rhyming couplet has to rhyme exactly for it to be considered a rhyme

I'm not operating under that impression, but the author is [1].

To me, the final "sounds" should match - not every syllable, an end rhyme according to wiki [0]. Specifically I would consider a rhyme to require matching sounds "at least from last vowel to end", but I don't think of rhymes first from the strict definition. Perhaps it's an accent thing but "-us" in cactus is not the same sound as "-ice" in practice. If a child made a poem with these sounds I would tell them "good job, it's a rhyme", and perhaps for the purpose of a silly word game too. But I would not use it as a passing case for a test of any sort like the author.

What's more pleasing is irrelevant, what is relevant is if its a true rhyme.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/end_rhyme#English

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=35258385&goto=item%3Fi...

> Perhaps it's an accent thing but "-us" in cactus is not the same sound as "-ice" in practice.

Indeed, it's an accent thing. In America at least, pronouncing "cactus" with an "is" or an "us" sound are both valid.

I think that given that the author provided a working definition, and your provided failure example is actually passing that definition (just only for the author's dialect), and given that you are now essentially trying to change the subject to "my definition of rhyme is the correct one"; well, you're just being...pedantic? argumentative? I'm not sure.

In the article, I mention that Twofer Goofer requires perfect or strict rhyme. Perfect and strict rhyme require that all syllables are pronounced identically in the speaker's tongue (for me, American Midwest accent), except for the first sound of the word which can vary.

Hence pooh-teen and proh-tein do not rhyme. Skell-ih-tin and Gell-ih-tin do rhyme.

A game like this requires a pretty tight rhyming definition to not annoy players in a given day!

Thanks for reading: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/perfect-vs-imperfect-rh...

what's wrong with that?

the use of novel puzzles is frankly awesome because there's a much lower chance of contamination from previous puzzles so we get a chance to see how much generalization they've achieved.

I'm complaining about the title writing a check that the blog post can't cash.
GPT-4 says: A more accurate and balanced title might be: "Comparing Bard and ChatGPT in Puzzle Solving: An Examination within the Context of a Word Game"
Sounds like GPT-4 will save us from clickbait
Fair! But if I wrote Twofer Goofer in the title it would not resonate at at all. Alas, tradeoffs.