[jsnell]

The paper doesn't mention it because either the researchers did not care to check the outputs manually, or reporting what was in the outputs would have made it obvious what their motives were.

When this research has been reproduced, the "failures" on the Tower of Hanoi are the model printing out a bunch of steps, saying there is no point in doing it thousands of times more. And they they'd either output an the algorithm for printing the rest in words or code

[godelski]

It's really easy to make a billion dollars. Just make a really useful app and sell it. There's no point explaining the rest since it's so trivial.

[jsnell]

That seems like a complete non sequitur. This is the model explaining the rest. Obviously the explanation is not very interesting since the Towers of Hanoi is not an interesting problem. But that's on the researches for choosing something with a trivial algorithm if their goal was to test reasoning abilities.

[godelski]

I'm replying to this

  > the model printing out a bunch of steps, saying there is no point in doing it thousands of times more.

[jsnell]

Ok, but the very next sentence was:

> And they they'd either output an the algorithm for printing the rest in words or code.

So clearly you already knew that your strawman was not relevant. Why try it anyway?

[godelski]

Because that wasn't the task given to them. It's like giving a student a test and you asking them to solve an equation and they give you the general form. It's incomplete