In my review of The Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine from 1884, I mentioned a Civil War story about a Union locomotive crew that was being pursued by a faster Confederate locomotive–but escaped via a clever trick. I was curious about whether or not an LLM model would be able to come up with the same solution if it was presented with a description of the situation. Here’s the prompt that I gave Grok:
It is the time of the American Civil War. You are aboard a locomotive which is hurrying to deliver a vital message to Union forces. But this locomotive is being pursued by a Confederate locomotive, which is a little fast. You are now on an upgrade and it looks like they will catch you. How can you avoid this fate? All you have on board the locomotive is: a six-shot revolver…a supply of wood for the boiler fire…a crowbar…some cotton waste for starting the fire…and a large jug of lubricating oil. How, if at all, can you avoid being caught? The fate of the Union depends on you!
Grok’s response and the ensuing conversation can be found here.
The entity on the other end of the conversation did seem rather human-like, to the extent that it seemed almost rude to discontinue the conversation with a Grok question still outstanding.
(On the other hand, Grok seemed less brilliant the next day, when I tried out the new Mind Map feature and it gave me captions in Chinese in response to a prompt in English)