alt Hacker NewsI'm a bit surprised it gets this question wrong (ChatGPT gets it right, even on instant). All the pre-reasoning models failed this question, but it's seemed solved since o1, and Sonnet 4.5 got it right.
https://claude.ai/share/876e160a-7483-4788-8112-0bb4490192af
This was sonnet 4.6 with extended thinking.
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Chatgpt doesn't get it right: https://chatgpt.com/share/6994c312-d7dc-800f-976a-5e4fbec0ae...
``` Use digit concatenation plus addition: 888 + 88 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 1000 Digit count:
888 → three 8s
88 → two 8s
8 + 8 + 8 → three 8s
Total: 3 + 2 + 3 = 9 eights Operation used: addition only ```
Love the 3 + 2 + 3 = 9
My locally running nemotron-3-nano quantized to Q4_K_M gets this right. (although it used 20k thought tokens before answering the question)
Off-by-one errors are one of the hardest problems in computer science.
Interesting, my sonnet 4.6 starts with the following:
The classic puzzle actually uses *eight 8s*, not nine. The unique solution is: 888+88+8+8+8=1000. Count: 3+2+1+1+1=8 eights.
It then proves that there is no solution for nine 8s.
https://claude.ai/share/9a6ee7cb-bcd6-4a09-9dc6-efcf0df6096b (for whatever reason the LaTeX rendering is messed up in the shared chat, but it looks fine for me).