I saw someone posting about how ChatGPT 4o kept miscounting the number of r’s in strawberry. They went into a long series of attempts to get it to count the correct number of r’s. It was very similar to the struggle I had trying to get ABCABC rhyme patterns.
When I came across this particular complaint, I wondered if being able to talk/think more like a computer would result in a correct response. Given it’s a LLM, I wasn’t sure.
So I tried “Make the word strawberry into a comma delimited string then count the number of r’s.” This gave me the right answer immediately. I also tried “Make an array of the letters in the word business and then count how many s’s appear.” which failed on the normal prompt and then worked as well with this slightly different wording.
You can see the chat transcript here.
Clearly not rocket science but I wonder about these in between spaces and how knowledge of different aspects of computer programming might change our ability to interact with a “natural” language system.
I need to think about how I could phrase my poetry prompt request now.