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by dotancohen 1123 days ago
I would not be surprised if these questions become some form of canonical test for future language models.

Obviously, being the work of Knuth, they are extraordinarily insightful in peeling back the first layer of the answer and providing insight to the underlying properties of both the model itself, and the dataset on which it was trained. It also tests the ability to compute (not recite) very specific facts (e.g. when the sun will be directly above Japan), so checks if subroutines and ephemerides specific to this type of data exist.

But beyond the obvious technical merit - there is an alluding property to base our tests on those whom we respect. I used a similar - but far less sophisticated - set of questions when first exploring ChatGPT. But nobody will be drawn to Dotan Cohen's language model benchmarks - rightfully so. The name Knuth has such reverence in the field that I forsee this test, and variations on it to prevent rigging, becoming a canonical test of language models.