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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

If you interpret the room with chairs in it as a storage room, all of the facts are relevant:

- we had 19 chairs in the storage room

- we used 10 chairs (removing them from storage)

- and then we purchased 9 more chairs (adding them to storage)

The answer from chatGPT is consistent with English and makes use of all the facts; either the question is testing for deception (intentionally sharing misleading information) or chatGPT made the correct inference, by assuming good faith and using all the provided information.

This question says something about us — that we’d assume deception ahead of unclear reference to a storage room by a good faith speaker.

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Yeah every iteration of this question in the GP thread is bad and has the same ambiguity that means the gotcha of "haha your interpretation of this poorly worded riddle doesn't match the answer I had in my head, checkmate" seems weak.

Possible answers:

- 19 chairs, least likely answer given the original

- 18 chairs, 10 of original 19 removed and 9 added

- 28 chairs, 19 chairs in the room with 10 in active use and 9 new chairs added

Just seems like a question a human would fail too. Probably opens a can of worms on interview questions and personal bias etc too in a more general sense. Not bias in the political sense, just how interview questions encode a lot of the asker's assumptions.

Edit: the only unambiguous phrasing I can think of is "19 chairs are in a room, 9 of the chairs are green, how many chairs are in the room?".

This is a very tortuous way to try to make this question ambiguous. Read the words in the problem and stop inserting additional facts: The room has 19 chairs. We are using 10 and then bought 9 more, how many chairs do we have in the room?

The room is the room (what type of room is not relevant). There are 19 chairs in it. The 19 chairs most likely got there when 9 more chairs were purchased after 10 were used, but that is not relevant to the question: how many chairs are in the room? 19.

A := 19

B := 10

C := 9

What does A equal?

You don't get to add new information to support what you think the answer is. Based on the wording of the question, it's not possible to know. Especially since it was intended to be a trick question to prove humanity is safe, they don't get the benefit of the doubt on how the question fails to provide enough information to answer. I'd recommend you read it again.

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