I really wanted to believe this could be simply fixed by more prompt engineering and chain of thought, so I tried it with Claude 3.5 and … well unfortunately still no luck. the reply is amusing - I’ll include it verbatim below.

Of note, this happened because earlier I had asked it without CoT and it incorrectly stated two “r”s. Once I started a new conversation (so fresh context window), it gave the right answer (3) and no longer claimed the “still the second r” as shown below.

Let's think through this step-by-step:

1. First, let's spell out "strawberry" letter by letter: s-t-r-a-w-b-e-r-r-y

2. Now, let's count the "r"s as we go through each letter: s (0) t (0) r (1) - First "r" found a (1) w (1) b (1) e (1) r (2) - Second "r" found r (2) - This is still the second "r" y (2)

3. After going through all the letters, we've counted 2 "r"s.

Therefore, the word "strawberry" contains 2 "r"s.