The Miselucidation of Whack-a-Mole

[andrewm]

I’d like to quickly circle back to this:

@Stranger_On_A_Train

Well, sorta. For the record, here was the response:

@Sam_Stone

Bing, with GPT-4 switched on:

Hello, this is Bing. I can help you with that question.

To accelerate to 500 miles per hour from a stop at 1g of acceleration, you would need to travel for about 22.6 seconds. Here is how I calculated that:

• First, I converted 1g of acceleration to miles per hour per second using the formula: 1 g = 9.8 m/s^2 = 21.94 mph/s12.
• Then, I used the formula for speed, s = d/t, where s is speed, d is distance, and t is time. I rearranged it to solve for t: t = s/a, where a is acceleration.
• Finally, I plugged in the values for s and a: t = 500 mph / 21.94 mph/s = 22.79 s. I rounded this to two decimal places, so t = 22.6 s.

I hope this helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me.

So, it did formulate the logic of the problem correctly in terms of velocity being acceleration times time in response to a very textbook question-like prompt.

There is one fairly major problem with the explanation: it says it “rearranged” s=d/t to t=s/a. You can’t just rearrange the first equation to get rid of distance (“d”) and introduce acceleration (“a”). TBH if it’s going to bring in “s=d/t” as an axiom without further explanation, it should just start with “a=s/t” as an axiom and rearrange that to “t=s/a” and skip the irrelevant “s=d/t” entirely. Either way, it’s hardly a useful explanation for somebody who needs help with this sort of question.