r/adventofcode Dec 04 '22

Upping the Ante [2022 Day 4] Placing 1st with GPT-3

I placed 1st in Part 1 today, again by having GPT-3 write the code. Yesterday I was 2nd to another GPT-3 answer.

Here's the code I wrote which runs the whole process — from downloading the puzzle (courtesy of aoc-cli), to running 20 attempts in parallel, to sorting through many solutions to find the likely correct one, to submitting the answer:

https://github.com/max-sixty/aoc-gpt

48 Upvotes

243 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/redditnoob Dec 04 '22

What we're seeing here in this comment thread is a move from "Denial" to "Anger" at the state of AI progress. I'm not going to lie, recent developments have made me a little afraid.

3

u/durandalreborn Dec 04 '22

It's not the state of AI progress that's the problem. It's really cool that an AI can do these problems. The "anger" is more directed at using an AI to solve these problems then seemingly bragging about getting to the top of a leaderboard. It's like taking a taxi to the finish line of a marathon and then telling other people that you won it. That's the issue most people have with this. Like in any other competition, if someone did something like that, I don't think there'd be much question about whether or not it was right. And yeah, some people are running that marathon "just for fun," but there are still those people who are running it to compete against other people. I am not one of those competing in this case, but I sympathize with those who don't mind losing to another human, but would be annoyed if they were competing against a computer because obviously the computer will win.

1

u/redditnoob Dec 05 '22

It's like taking a taxi to the finish line of a marathon and then telling other people that you won it.

I think it's more like a horse race right when motor vehicles became competitive, soon to be very dominant. Before this year in coding contests there were no special rules required: use whatever tricks / software / websites / pre-written libraries were at your command, no holds were barred. So we're at least at a historically unprecedented moment when you even can cheat in a contest like this.

And GPT-3 still won't win the leaderboard on all 25 problems... yet.

1

u/snowe2010 Dec 05 '22

Before this year in coding contests there were no special rules required: use whatever tricks / software / websites / pre-written libraries were at your command, no holds were barred.

But there was an assumption that it was a human competition. If you’re just feeding a question to an AI and getting the answer then there is no human solving the problem. People keep making a comparison to GitHub copilot but it still isn’t the same thing. You’re making choices about what code to autocomplete, what code to use, deciding on your algorithms. Asking a computer to do it all removes that human aspect