Comment by eru

6 hours ago

You can ask Claude for the solutions?

Sure I can. But from my experience solutions in math books usually continue learning process and can provide even more insight to a problem. Solutions from ChatGPT or Claude barely can replace that.

(Edit) But I understand that goal of a book can be completely different. So it's just problem of my expectations.

  • all of the books I had in university basically just gave me the final result at the back of the book with no explanation, so I am quite jealous if this was your experience with textbooks. Could you name some of these books? They might be nice to buy!

If you don't have the solutions, how do you verify Claude's work?

  • Everything, except the bleeding edge and situations requiring the context window to be more than 60% filled, are elementary to Opus 5.5 . If you provide the questions completely, you can be very sure that Claude’s solutions will be correct. The world has changed; AI is reliable; we need to adapt.

    • I get a lot of obviously wrong or slightly wrong answers from all LLMs across the board. If you don't double-check you just don't know or you might miss it.

      And for the bleeding edge part: My godchild wanted to know the name of a Pokémon from his licensed shirt. One of the first ones, found in every training set. Couldn't get it right, was certain it was the wrong one.

      1 reply →

    • > The world has changed; AI is reliable; we need to adapt.

      Yes, but I think it's important to state that it's only reliable for things that are very well known and extensively written about.

  • The same way you'd verify a textbook's solution.

    (Assuming it's a proof or something - if it's just a number - oh well).

  • ?

    You don't ask for proofs to print them out, put them in your drawer, and brag around that you own the proofs for these exercises.

    You ask Claude for proofs to help your understanding. Understanding is the exact same activity as verifying.

  • If you don’t understand the solutions, how can you verify textbook solutions? And sometimes they’re wrong, maybe subtle typos, causing hours of grief and feelings of inferiority.