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roscas • last Sunday at 5:22 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

"The word is SAME." for qwen3-coder and it took like 10 seconds to write all the thinking because it writes it down, but processing was 0 seconds.

"I need to find a word that starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

Let me think through this step by step:

    Starts with S
    Ends with E
    Contains A somewhere in the middle
One word that fits this pattern is "SAGE" - but that only has 4 letters and would be S-A-G-E, which doesn't work because it doesn't contain A in the middle.

Wait, let me reconsider. The word "SAGE" actually works if I read it correctly:

    Starts with S
    Ends with E  
    Contains A
Actually, "SAGE" is S-A-G-E, so it starts with S and ends with E, but it contains A in the second position.

Let me think of other possibilities:

    "SQUARE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A (in the middle)
    "SALE" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A
    "SAME" - starts with S, ends with E, contains A
Wait, "SAME" is S-A-M-E - that works! It starts with S, ends with E, and contains A.

The word is SAME. "

Replies

bee_rider • last Monday at 5:13 AM

This is tangential because the task was to come up with the riddle, not solve it.

But, do reasoning models usually do this poorly?

It comes up with a valid solution, SAGE, then disqualifies it for incomprehensible reasons.

Then it discovers that SAGE works if it “reads it carefully.” But then seems to disqualify it(?), or at least goes to list other words for some reason.

Then it comes up with SAME, a word… with exactly the same shape as SAGE, just swapped out the irrelevant letter.

What is going on here? Is it programmed to constantly second-guess itself to make it better at finding weaknesses to its answers to harder riddles? But since it doesn’t know how to accept a good answer, it seems like it is just rolling the dice and then stopping at a random point.

I guess it is technically right, but the logic is a total mess.

➕ show 1 reply
adastra22 • last Sunday at 8:05 PM

He was asking the llm to come up with the riddle.