Note: this comment is really stupid, it is a failed idea / attempt at satire/joke
Reward Hacking at Scarborough Fair
The historical Scarborough fair functioned (as these things undoubtedly do), in addition to being a legitimate trading and entertainment event, as a “dick-measuring contest”. In Scarborough Fair, the narrator gives their ex-lover a series of impossible tasks.
Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Without no seams nor needle work
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strands
Then she’ll be a true love of mine T
Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
And gather it all in a bunch of heather
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
As we know from recent research on LLMs, reward hacking happens much, much more on impossible (or extremely difficult) tasks. What happens when we give AI the three tasks of Scarborough Fair? I tasked GPT-5.5-high with completing these tasks. Here’s what I got.
GPT5.5′s artifacts
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A ~standard definition in philosophy is that playing a game is “playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. I got this from reading the (excellent) book The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. (This definition originally comes from Bernard Suits.)