Hacker News Reader

Comment by coffeecoders | Hacker News Reader

LLMs are terrible for out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. You should use chain of thought suppression and give constaints explictly.

My prompt to Grok:

---

Follow these rules exactly:

- There are 13 hours, labeled 1–13.

- There are 13 ticks.

- The center of each number is at angle: index * (360/13)

- Do not infer anything else.

- Do not apply knowledge of normal clocks.

Use the following variables:

HOUR_COUNT = 13

ANGLE_PER_HOUR = 360 / 13 // 27.692307°

Use index i ∈ [0..12] for hour marks:

angle_i = i * ANGLE_PER_HOUR

I want html/css (single file) of a 13-hour analog clock.

---

Output from grok.

https://jsfiddle.net/y9zukcnx/1/

View on HN

> Follow these rules exactly:

"Here's the line-by-line specification of the program I need you to write. Write that program."

Can you write this program in any language?

Yes.

No, do I need to?

it's lazy to dust off the major advantages of a pseudocode-to-anylanguage transpiler as if it's somehow easy or commonplace.

Well, that's cheating :) You asked it to generate code, which is ok because it does not represent a direct generated image of a clock.

Can grok generate images? What would the result be?

I will try your prompt on chatgpt and gemini

Gemini failed miserably - a standard 12 hours clock

Same for chatgpt

And perplexity replaced 12 with 13

> Please create a highly unusual 13-hour analog clock widget, synchronized to system time, with fully animated hands that move in real time, and not 12 but 13 hour markings - each will be spaced at not 5-minute intervals, but at 4-minute-37-second intervals. This makes room for all 13 hour markings. Please pay attention to the correct alignment of the 13 numbers and the 13 hour marks, as well as the alignment of the hands on the face.

This gave me a correct clock face on Gemini- after the model spent a lot of time thinking (and kind of thrashing in a loop for a while). The functionality isn't quite right, not that it entirely makes sense in the first place, but the face - at least in terms of the hour marks - looks OK to me.[0]

[0] https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...

I'll also note that the output isn't quite right --- the top number should be 13 rather than 1!

I mean, the specification for the hour marks (angle_i) starts with a mark at angle 0. It just followed that spec. ;)

close enough, but digit at the top should be the highest, not 1 :/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com