this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings. (awful.systems)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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So I signed up for a free month of their crap because I wanted to test if it solves novel variants of the river crossing puzzle.

Like this one:

You have a duck, a carrot, and a potato. You want to transport them across the river using a boat that can take yourself and up to 2 other items. If the duck is left unsupervised, it will run away.

Unsurprisingly, it does not:

https://g.co/gemini/share/a79dc80c5c6c

https://g.co/gemini/share/59b024d0908b

The only 2 new things seem to be that old variants are no longer novel, and that it is no longer limited to producing incorrect solutions - now it can also incorrectly claim that the solution is impossible.

I think chain of thought / reasoning is a fundamentally dishonest technology. At the end of the day, just like older LLMs it requires that someone solved a similar problem (either online or perhaps in a problem solution pair they generated if they do that to augment the training data).

But it outputs quasi reasoning to pretend that it is actually solving the problem live.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (26 children)

I'm kinda tired, but this puzzle's shoved itself into my brain. The obvious solution I can see is, roughly speaking:

  1. Take the duck and carrot across

  2. Take the duck back

  3. Take the duck and potato across

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

My two solutions:

  1. Eat the carrot. Take the duck and potato across.
  2. It's a row boat. Take the carrot and potato, supervise the duck as it swims behind you.

I'm not doing three river crossings, you can't make me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

another solution:

take duck, carrot and potato at once. if boat is fine if you put duck and carrot in but will sink if you put in duck, carrot and potato then you're already on horrifyingly narrow engineering margins and probably shouldn't use it in the first place

in the worst case you can put duck on a leash if it'll run away otherwise

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