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Comment by 331c8c71 | Hacker News Reader

Weird. There are some impressive examples and then it fails spectacularly e.g. by simply removing all square root signs at one step.

Given that type of failure I must conclude the model didnt learn essential fundamentals of math reasoning (i guess it was clear from the start it is not built to do so).

I would like to have an interactive demo where I can type tasks for it.

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> then it fails spectacularly

Like a math professor never forgot to carry a sign or programmers don't make off by one errors. It's quite endearing to see it make human like errors.

One of the errors the authors presented was

> f(x) = f(y) + f(z) => x = y + z

where f(.) denotes square root.

This is very different in nature from flipping a sign or a one-off error.

I mean that’s pretty close to a mistake that students make so frequently it has a Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshman%27s_dream

lol. it's a funny name but I find it hard to believe it's actually a common mistake. my experience is that squaring and multiplying polynomials is done so often in high school that it's hard not to learn this is not true (i studied in an ordinary high school in russia, not any special one).

Me too, I studied it in Romania and it was very basic and well drilled. But plenty of students just blocked out math. I bet the Minerva model learned it on the internet, some bad training example could explain it.

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