Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 100

“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

37 is well represented. Proof that we've taught AI some of our own weird biases.

holy crap, the answer to life the universe and everything XD

What does "temperature" on the Y-axis refer to?

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..

Ask humans the same and most common numer is 37

WAIT A MINUTE!!! You mean Douglas Adams was actually an LLM?

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.

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_number

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.

37

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.

42, 47, and 50 all make sense to me. What’s the significance of 37, 57, and 73?

LMs aren't thinking, aren't inventing, they are predicting what is supposed to be answered next, so it's expected that they will produce the same results every time

So what? It figured out The Answer, big whoop.

Get back to me when it figures out The Question.

What's the y axis?

I petition to rename ChatGPT to DeepThought based on these results.

I spent an afternoon once playing Infinite Craft, which uses some sort of LLM behind the scenes to do it's combinations.

At one point I got 007, and found 007+007 = 0014.

The maths gets wild though, and because it's been trained on text, it has no idea when it comes to combinations of numbers it hasn't seen before. I spent ages trying to get it to 69420 and just couldn't, although I could get 42069.

No shit, sherlock, it's sample data is the internet.

Well.... I was not aware Chatgpt could make simple graphs.

Obviously the bots do not share in our human fondness for the number 69.