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msoad • 01/20/2025 • 4 replies • view on HN

> Give me five odd numbers that don't have the letter 'e' in their spelling

Compare the reasoning times!!! 84s vs 342s

R1 (Thought for 84 seconds)

      No odd number in English avoids the letter 'e' in its spelling. The request for five such numbers cannot be fulfilled.
o1 Pro (Thought for 5 minutes and 42 seconds)

      No standard English spelling of an odd number can avoid “e.” Every odd digit (one, three, five, seven, nine) already includes “e,” so once you build any odd number out of those digits, the spelled‐out form will contain “e.” As a result, there are no such odd numbers in standard English without an “e” in their name.

Replies

mattkrause • 01/20/2025

Even after five minutes, the logic has a (small) hole.

Not all odd spell out the digit: thirteen, fifteen (and maybe eleven?) are odd but don’t have an ‘e’ in the word’s “digit” part, though they obviously do elsewhere.

➕ show 1 reply
mchinen • 01/20/2025

[Edit: I suppose the correct answer was for the full model]. What I got was much worse when I ran with hf.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-GGUF:Q8_0. (I think the glyph-based reasoning is especially hard for models though, since they have a token-level blindness to them):

  >>> Give me 5 odd numbers that don't have the letter 'e' in them.

  <think>
  Okay, so I need to come up with five odd numbers that don't have the letter 'e' in their name. Hmm, let's break this down step by step. First, what exactly is being asked here? The user wants numbers, specifically odd ones, and they can't contain the letter 'e'. So 
  I guess it's about the written form of the numbers, not their mathematical properties. For example, 13 is an odd number, and when you write it out, it's "thirteen," which does have an 'e' in it. So that wouldn't work.

  Alright, so I need to think of numbers where their names don't include 'e'. Let me start by listing some odd numbers and then check if each has an 'e' in their name. The first few odd numbers are 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, etc.

  Let's go one by one:

  1. "One": No 'e' here. So 1 is a candidate.
  2. "Three": Yes, that has an 'e'.
  3. "Five": Again, no 'e'. So 5 works.
  4. "Seven": Has an 'e' as well.
  5. "Nine": No 'e' in "nine". Good to go.

  Wait, so far I have 1, 5, and 9 as possible numbers. Let me keep going.
  <truncated by me...>
  Wait, let me make sure. The word "forty" is F-O-R-T-Y, no 'e', so adding "-one" which doesn't add an 'e' either. So yes, "forty-one" has no 'e's. So that's another number: 41.

  So now I have five numbers: 1, 5, 9, 19, and 41.

  Let me double-check each to ensure they don't contain the letter 'e':

  - One: No 'e'.
  - Five: No 'e'.
  - Nine: No 'e'.
  - Nineteen: No 'e'.
  - Forty-one: No 'e'.

  Yes, all of these are odd numbers and their names do not include the letter 'e'. I think that's a solid list.
  </think>

  Here is a list of five odd numbers whose names do not contain the letter 'e':

  1. **One**  
  2. **Five**  
  3. **Nine**  
  4. **Nineteen**  
  5. **Forty-one**

  These numbers are all odd, and their written forms do not include the letter 'e'.
coffeebeqn • 01/20/2025

Took 1m 36s for me. My default prompt is a bit different “think from first principles”. It’s pretty verbose but I enjoyed looking through all the work it did. Pretty impressive !