this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Gemini seem to have "solved" my duck river crossing, lol. (awful.systems)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Tried my duck river crossing thing a few times recently, it usually solves it now, albeit with a bias to make unnecessary trips half of the time.

Of course, anything new fails:

There's 2 people and 1 boat on the left side of the river, and 3 boats on the right side of the river. Each boat can accommodate up to 6 people. How do they get all the boats to the left side of the river?

Did they seriously change something just to deal with my duck puzzle? How odd.

It's Google so it is not out of the question that they might do some analysis on the share links and referring pages, or even use their search engine to find discussions of a problem they're asked. I need to test that theory and simultaneously feed some garbage to their plagiarism machine...

Sample of the new botshit:

L->R: 2P take B_L. L{}, R{2P, 4B}. R->L: P1 takes B_R1. L{P1, B_R1}, R{P2, 3B}. R->L: P2 takes B_R2. L{2P, B_R1, B_R2}, R{2B}. L->R: P1 takes B_R1 back. L{P2, B_R2}, R{P1, 3B}. R->L: P1 takes B_R3. L{P1, P2, B_R2, B_R3}, R{2B}. L->R: P2 takes B_R2 back. L{P1, B_R3}, R{P2, 3B}.

And again and again, like a buggy attempt at brute forcing the problem.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I'm not familiar with the cannibal/missionary framed puzzle, but reading through it the increasingly simplified notation reads almost like a comp sci textbook trying to find or outline an algorithm for something, but with an incredibly simple problem. We also see it once again explicitly acknowledge then implicitly discard part of the problem; in this case it opens by acknowledging that each boat can carry up to 6 people and that each boat needs at least one person, but somehow gets stuck on the pattern that we need to alternate trips left and right and each trip can only consist of one boat. It's still pattern matching rather than reasoning, even if the matching gets more sophisticated.