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by leptons 290 days ago
Could the LLM "write code to solve it" if no human ever wrote code to solve it? Could it output "steps to solve it" if no human ever wrote about it before to have in its training data? The answer is no.
1 comments

Could a human code the solution if they didn't learn to code from someone else? No. Could they do it if someone didn't tell them the rules of towers of hanoi? No.

That doesn't mean much.

It does since humans where able to invent a programming language.
Have you tried asking a modern LLM to invent a programming language?
Have you? If so, how'd it go? Sounds like an interesting exercise.
A human can learn and understand the rules, an LLM never could. LLMs have famously been incapable of beating humans in chess, a seemingly simple thing to learn, because LLMs can't learn - they just predict the next word and that isn't helpful in solving actual problems, or playing simple games.
Actually general-purpose LLMs are pretty decent at playing chess games they haven't seen before: https://maxim-saplin.github.io/llm_chess/