1. Forum
  2. USENET
  3. uk.rec.motorcycles

  • Re: OT: Timewaster

    From YTC1@ytc1@ytc1.co.uk to uk.rec.motorcycles on Sun Feb 1 10:26:38 2026
    From Newsgroup: uk.rec.motorcycles

    On 01/02/2026 10:05, Champ wrote:
    On Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:43:51 -0000 (UTC), Ben Blaney <benblaney@gmail.invalid> wrote:

    Instead of wasting my brain on this, I asked ChatGPT.

    Hmm

    I go to the 19 min answer immediately, as I guess most do

    I then used Mike Fleming's reasonsing to think - "what is the nature
    of a flashlight? - it projects lights" - so then had Ari stand in the
    middle of the bridge shining a light for each person, and so
    eliminating the return trips, which gets you to 17. But apparently
    that's not allowed :-)

    I didn't get to the insight that you need to send Cal and Don
    together, to wrap Don's time in with Cal's, saving 5 mins.

    <gritted teeth>
    Well done ChatGPT

    Hmm, all it did was do a search and find the correct answer. So, well
    done coders of ChatGP.

    <swerve to other thread>
    But as none of us think ChatGPT is a reasoning engine, how did it get
    the answer? Is not the most likely way that, trained on millions of
    internet pages, it already knew it somewhere, and just regurgitated
    it? In which case "I asked ChatGPT" becomes "I asked the internet"?
    I pasted the problem exactly as stated by Mark into a search engine,
    and found dozens of hits, including Wikipedia. So ChatGPT didn't
    *solve* the problem, it just searched for the answer and formatted it
    nicely for you.

    I typed the above before reading your 2nd paragraph (old habits), so
    have left it in :-)
    --
    Bruce Porter
    "The internet is a huge and diverse community but mainly friendly" http://ytc1.blogspot.co.uk/
    There *is* an alternative! http://www.openoffice.org/
    --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2