“You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.”
“Er, five,” said the mattress.
“Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
The mattress? Like for sleeping?
Yep! The hitchhikers books are so much fun lol
I still think one of my favorite lines is “the ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
37 is well represented. Proof that we’ve taught AI some of our own weird biases.
What’s special about 37? Just that it’s prime or is there a superstition or pop culture reference I don’t know?
If you discount the pop-culture numbers (for us 7, 42, and 69) its the number most often chosen by people if you ask them for a random number between 1 and 100. It just seems the most random one to choose for a lot of people. Veritasium just did a video about it.
37 is my favorite, because 3x7x37=777 (three sevens), and I think that’s neat.
Wrong. Two hints:
7x7=9 at the end, not 7.
30x30=900, already more than 777.
One hint: 3x7=21, 21x37=777.
When in doubt, use a calculator.
Oh I am sorry. I did not see the x sign between 3 and 7. Lol.
? My calculator definitely thinks that 3x7x37=777. Did you read it as 37x37 instead?
Yes. Thanks. Sorry.
You don’t even need a calculator for a quick calculation, take the closest value of 10: 3x7=21x37 or easier 20x40 = 800 which is close to the actual number, 777.
What about 57
I’m curious about that too. Something is twisting weights for 57 fairly strongly in the model but I’m not show what. Maybe its been trained on a bunch of old Heinz 57 varieties marketing.
Wesley Snipes
Heinz Ketchup?
I don’t like the inclusion of 37%, it’s 1/e that isn’t even 37%, is only that because of a pretty arbitrary rounding. Veritasium videos are usually OK, but this one is pretty meh.
Thanks!
Is there some human sciences theory as to why?
Another fun fact: if you ask people to pick 2/3rds of a number everyone else picks when asked the same question, the correct number is drumroll 24.
Sorry but pop culture from were? I don’t recognize any of those numbers.
Lucky number 7.
42 is the meaning of life in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
And 69…nice!
I’m guessing this is for US and UK culture? Probably a lot of other former and current English colonies
It’s not the meaning of life. It’s the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Nobody knows what the Question is.
Thanks. I Borked that one up
deleted by creator
Probably just because it’s prime. It’s just that humans are terrible at understanding the concept of randomness. A study by Theodore P. Hill showed that when tasked to pick a random number between 1 and 10, almost a third of the subjects (n was over 8500) picked 7. 10 was the least picked number (if you ditch the few idiots that picked 0).
Maybe randomness is a label we slapped on shit we don’t understand.
I remember watching a lecture about probability, and the professor said that only quantum processes are really random, the rest of things that we call random is just the human inability to measure the variables that affects the random outcome. I’m an actuarie, and it’s made me change the perspective on how I see and study random processes and how it made think on ways to influence the outcome of random processes.
…which is kind of a hilarious tautology, because “quantum processes” are by definition “processes that we are unable to decompose into more basic parts”.
The moment we learn about some more fundamental processes being the reason for a given process, it stops being “quantum” and the new ones become “it”.
Even quantum just appears random I think. it’s beyond our scope of perspective, it works in multiple dimensions. we only see part of the process. That’s my guess though it could be totally wrong
it’s a matter of interpretation, but generally the consensus is that quantum measurements are truly probabilistic (random), Bell proved that there can’t be any hidden variables that influence the outcome
Didn’t Bell just put that up as a theory and it got proven somewhat recently by other researchers? The 2022 physics Nobel Prize was about disproving hidden variables and they titled their finding with the catchy phrase “the universe is not locally real”.
Interpretation for sure. Bells theory and then it being proven winning a Nobel prize to me only proves more we really don’t understand the world around us and only perceive what we need to survive. And that maybe we should be less standoffish to ideas that change our current paradigm, because we obviously have a lot to learn.
I didn’t know either, but it seems to be an often picked ‘random’ number by people. Here is an article about it, I didn’t read it though.
Watch this:
https://youtu.be/d6iQrh2TK98?feature=shared
Just a number dumb monkeys believe to be “more random”.
My art professor wrote a book about famous artists and thinkers dying at 37: Raffaello, Parmigianino, Valentin de Boulogne, Cantarini, Watteau, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Tancredi, Gnoli, Manai, Majakovskij, Rimbaud, Byron, Mozart, Robespierre
https://www.ibs.it/trentasette-mistero-del-genio-adolescente-libro-flavio-caroli/e/9788804734017
Not a great book tbh.
Only dudes, though, right?
holy crap, the answer to life the universe and everything XD
I mean… they didn’t specify it had to be random (or even uniform)? But yeah, it’s a good showcase of how GPT acquired the same biases as people, from people…
uniform
Reminds me of my previous job where our LLM was grading things too high. The AI “engineer” adjusted the prompt to tell the LLM that the average output should be 3. I had a hard time explaining that wouldn’t do anything at all, because all the chats were independent events.
Anyways, I quit that place and the project completely derailed.
Ask humans the same and most common numer is 37
I saw that YouTube video as well.
For very different reasons though. 37 is what people think is the most random, because humans are dumb. The LLM here tried to choose the most likely.
Hello Veritasium enjoyer
In his video, he shows that the more common answers are actually 42 and 69.
I discards them because they’re picked for a reason rather than a human genuinely trying trying to pick a random number, but they’re still way more common than 37.
That’s because they asked the internet for those polls. The internet thinks they’re funny by picking the meme numbers. So I can understand why they chose to omit those numbers from their results.
What are you referring to?
YouTube STEM educator. 15 million subscribers. Probably in the top 5 STEM educators on the platform.
He released a video on the number 37 two weeks ago, with 6 million views.
I know veritasium but I hadn’t seen the video. Thanks, I’ll check it out.
I thought I’d give you context just in case, as your question was vague. You might not have consumed YouTube and was blissfully unaware. :)
Thank you for being thoughtful :)
Most probably this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98
Thanks, I’ll have a look
HOW DID THE TRUCK GET INTO SPACE??
Love that episode though.
I always like to throw out 37 because of Dante’s girlfriend.
WAIT A MINUTE!!! You mean Douglas Adams was actually an LLM?
I’ve never seen Douglas Adams and a LLM in the same room together 🤷
So many things are starting to make sense
In an interview, Douglas Adams said after lengthy consideration John Cleese picked 42 as the least interesting number.
HA, funny that this comes up. DND Beyond doesn’t have a d100, so I opened my ChatGPT sub and had it roll a d100 for me a few times so I could use my magic beans properly.
I use the percentile die for that.
Also an excellent method.
Opened up DND Beyond to check since i remember rolling it before and its there, its between D8 and D10, the picture shows 2 dice
That’s helpful. Thank you.
Roll two d10, once for each digit, and profit?
I guess you’d need 10 to represent 0, and if you got 2x 10 that would be 100?
Yup! Also one has to mind the order in which one rolls the dice. Since 10 and 5 could be either 05 or 50. As a bonus, if you roll them in order of “tens” to “ones”, getting 10 on the first dice has added suspense since the latter dice determines if it is going to count as a low roll of 0X (by rolling 1-9 on the next dice X) or if it is going to be a max roll of 100 (by rolling another 10).
But why use Chatgpt for that? Why not a duck duck go action? I just don’t understand why we’re asking a LLM whose goal is consistency, not randomness, to do random
Which model?
When I tried on ChatGPT 4, it wrote a short python script and executed it to get a random integer.
import random # Pick a random number between 1 and 100 random_number = random.randint(1, 100) random_numberdoes the neural network actually run scripts or is it pretending
It generates code and then you can use a call to some runtime execution API to run that code, completely separate from the neural network.
That’s not answering the question though.
“Pick a number between 1 and 100” doesn’t mean “grab two d10” or write a script.
Only 1000 times? It’s interesting that there’s such a bias there but it’s a computer. Ask it 100,000 times and make sure it’s not a fluke.
42, 47, and 50 all make sense to me. What’s the significance of 37, 57, and 73?
There’s a great Veritasium video recently about this exact thing: https://youtu.be/d6iQrh2TK98
It’s a human thing, though. This is just more evidence of LLM’s problem with garbage in, garbage out: it’s human biases being present in a system that people want to claim doesn’t have them.
Veritasium just released a video about people picking 37 when asked to pick a random number.
People do mention Veritasium, though he doesn’t give any significant explanation of the phenomenon.
I still wonder about 47. In Veritasium plots, all these numbers provide a peak, but not 47. I recall from my childhood that I indeed used to notice that number everywhere, but idk why.
47 does provide a peak in the plots though? All the numbers ending in 7 do.
See my link for 47. Its Wikipedia has more context. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen it a ton.
The 47 page…woo woo
And Hitman
37
In a row?!
Try not to suck any dick on the way to the parking lot!
What’s the y axis?
The temperature scale, I think. You divide the logit output by the temperature before feeding it to the softmax function. Larger (resp. smaller) temperature results in a higher (resp. lower) entropy distribution.
I don’t understand any of these words, I need to take a math class or something
Higher temperature -> more chaotic output
I still don’t understand.
More yellow more common, more blue less common
Each row in the figure is a probability distribution over possible outputs (x-axis labels). The more yellow, the more likely (see the colour map on the right). With a small temperature (e.g., last row), all the probability mass is on 42. This is a low entropy distribution because if you sample from it you’ll constantly get 42, so no randomness whatsoever (think entropy as a measure of randomness/chaos). As temperature increases (rows closer to the first/topmost one), 42 is still the most likely output, but the probability mass gets dispersed to other possible outputs too (other outputs get a bit more yellow), resulting in higher entropy distributions. Sampling from such distribution gives you more random outputs (42 would still be frequent, but you’d get 37 or others too occasionally). Hopefully this is clearer.
Someone in another reply uses the word “creativity” to describe the effect of temperature scaling. The more commonly used term in the literature is “diversity”.
Temperature is basically how creative you want the AI to be. The lower the temperature, the more predictable (and repeatable) the response.
Creativity is hot. That makes more sense, thanks.
So what? It figured out The Answer, big whoop.
Get back to me when it figures out The Question.
NEEDS MOAR 69 FELLOW HUMAN
I’m curious, is there actually so many 42’s in the system? (more than 69 sounds unlikely)
What if the LLM is getting tripped up because 42 is always referred to as the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”.
So you ask it a question like give a number between 1-100, it answers 42 because that’s the answer to “Everything”, according to it’s training data.
Something similar happened to Gemini. Google discouraged Gemini from giving unsafe advice because it’s unethical. Then Gemini refused to answer questions about C++ because it’s considered “unsafe” (referring to memory management). But Gemini thinks C++ is “unsafe” (the normal meaning), therefore it’s unethical. It’s like those jailbreak tricks but from its own training set.
I’m curious, is there actually so many 42’s in the system?
Sort of, it’s not actually picking a random number. It does not know what “random” means. It is analyzing the number of times the question “pick a random number” was asked and what the most common responses to that question looked like.
I certainly hope that’s what happening or maybe it is actually the answer.
