[RandomLensman]

Couple of points:

For me that points to reasoning happening by replication of sorts of often poor human output, but not by having a "mechanic" way to reason. As I said, humans are often poor at reasoning.

I also think code creation isn't a good area because it is narrower and more mechanically linked by probability than a lot of other areas (so token probability is potentially more informative). I could be wrong there, though.

[vidarh]

What do you even mean by "mechanic" way to reason here?

And what do you expect it'd replicate? As I wrote, I tried looking to see if there were similar pieces of code online, and came up empty. I did that exactly because I was curious about the huge gap in quality between what I'd found before and what GPT4 came up with. Not least because it certainly is not something that happens every time.

> I also think code creation isn't a good area because it is narrower and more mechanically linked by probability than a lot of other areas (so token probability is potentially more informative).

I don't see why that would make it worse. Not least because it also makes it far easier to evaluate the outcome. If anything, we ourselves grasp for formalisms and structure when we want to ensure our reasoning is sound.

Again your use of "mechanically" here also makes absolutely no sense to me.

[RandomLensman]

No, sorry, I view code creation as easier than other things.

I meant it replicates generally poor human reasoning capabilities but there is no general method to reason something out (because token probabilities are not informative to that end). You can train humans somewhat to that end, but not easy.

[vidarh]

> No, sorry, I view code creation as easier than other things.

Then we will get nowhere, as it's trivially easy to stump even above averagely intelligent people with problems revolving around reasoning about code.

To me you've then set the bar at a level the vast majority of people can't meet and that's utterly absurd.

And code is just formalised language.

[RandomLensman]

Formalised stuff might favor probabilistic approaches - that was my point.

Anyway, I think "intelligence" and "reasoning" or not always the same to start with.

Why is setting bar high absurd? It is the same way I demand my pocket calculator to be so much better than humans at calculating things.

[vidarh]

Firstly, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever for that hypothesis. But secondly, this is also poor reasoning. Your argument boils down to implying that if it's good at X, then there might be a bias in its favour with respect to X that makes it a poor judge of whether it's reasoning. By extension, making that argument engages in the logical fallacy of begging the question (assuming the conclusion).

> Why is setting bar high absurd? It is the same way I demand my pocket calculator to be so much better than humans at calculating things.

This is also poor reasoning. We demand the pocket calculator be better because otherwise we would have no use for it. It would be logically invalid to argue that if it was merely as capable as a human, maybe one that is not very good but still able to calculate, that it is unable to calculate at all.

[RandomLensman]

I would suggest to read what I wrote instead of projecting - anyway, ad hominens are always the end of a discussion. Good luck!