Gemini

I recently learned, from the ever-illuminating Simon Willison, that Google has released a new model, gemini-2-0-flash-thinking-exp. So, naturally, I posed it a question, a little puzzle if you will. Given the following conditions, how many ways can Professor Y assign six different books to four different students? The most expensive book must be assigned to student X. Each student must receive at least one book. It took the model some time, a moment of digital contemplation, to complete the task. But it did, correctly yielding the answer 390. So now, alongside gpt-o1, we have another model capable of solving this combinatorial problem, a problem that, it must be said, eludes most of my students. It seems that these “inference scaling” based models will be able to solve more such problems, each one a small victory for the silicon mind. Another reason, perhaps, why I no longer set homework and only give quizzes, a small act of surrender in the face of the inevitable. ...