Yeah, same happens if you ask r1 to do it. It reasons that doing it manually would be too time-consuming and starts trying to find clever workarounds, assumes that there must be some hidden pattern in the numbers that lets you streamline the computation.
Which makes perfect sense: reasoning models weren’t trained to be brute-force calculators, they were trained to solve clever math puzzles. So, from the distribution of problems they faced, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to make that doing it the brute way is the “wrong” way.
Yeah, same happens if you ask r1 to do it. It reasons that doing it manually would be too time-consuming and starts trying to find clever workarounds, assumes that there must be some hidden pattern in the numbers that lets you streamline the computation.
Which makes perfect sense: reasoning models weren’t trained to be brute-force calculators, they were trained to solve clever math puzzles. So, from the distribution of problems they faced, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to make that doing it the brute way is the “wrong” way.