Write a GCD program for the HP-41C with chatGPT

[pier4r]

Oh ChatGPT arrived also here. It is a really interesting development. As Didier pointed out, the model is often "confidently incorrect", especially on topics where the initial training data does not have many data points.

I am surprised it knows the 41C as the datapoints in the training data (they used Common Crawl as the main dataset) surely are minimal.

Other languages fails as well. For example if one asks about RPL, it tries with Lisp. Puppet is mixed with Ruby. Terraform is mixed with other programs too.

In other words, it tries, and it shows confidence (that more often than not is enough for a human to accept the answer), but it can be subtly wrong.

Instead of small code snippets in the most common languages (python, java, what have you, but also awk or bash) it works well. I find it neat to ask for pointers and directions rather than full solutions, a sort of "quick search engine". In that case it works really well.

Much better is to work with human languages (again, the most common ones at least). I use it for German, English and Italian and it is pretty neat. Like checking the grammar, building example sentences with words or providing meaning of the words. I often double check with vocabularies and grammar books but in human languages it is really helpful.

There are also many other usages. For example it could be an helper for the outline of an article or book, given some initial pointers. It also helps for recommendations, like "I liked this list of movies or books or places or what have you, what should I check next?". The recommendations weren't bad!


The important part to keep in mind is though: it picks the next words based on statistics "what will likely be here given my training dataset", so it can be subtly wrong in all possible cases if one lowers the guard. Also because in the internet people like me write with broken grammar (or code or what have you) all the time and the training data comes from the net.