Example using ChatGPT to do something useful

rob

So I wanted to test it on something useful here, and here is a conversation I had.
https://sharegpt.com/c/NPI0Cy5
To be clear, I am trying to let it show its power, rather than searching for its limitations. I think it did the former quite well.

I started out just giving it some ballots and telling it they are for an ranked choice election. It gave me a lot of information showing me it understood the format.

Then I asked to to make a javascript class to parse the ballots. Rather than describe the rules, I just let it figure them out based on the ballots I provided. (note that the ballots I pasted in were from this codepen https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/PoRvYaX . Unfortunately when I pasted them in and refreshed the page, all the line feeds were gone making it a bit harder for us humans to read)

I gave it general guidance on how to make an Election class, which is provided a set of ballot in that format to store them in an internal (expanded) form, and to be able to write it back out to the original text format.

Then I asked it to tabulate as IRV.

Then I asked it to tabulate as Recursive IRV, something I proposed six months ago but never fully implemented. (while it is obviously very computationally expensive the deeper you recurse, I have a feeling that, if it recursed to infinity, it would be impossible to beat it in terms of immunity to vote splitting effects. If true, I think that is a major finding, since it could serve as a benchmark)

I don't know whether it works, but it sure gave it the old college try. (I'll have it make me a nice test harness on Codepen when I get a chance) Note that I only spent like 15 minutes on it.

In the future I'd like to have it do some sort of way of visualizing the results, such as a nested Sankey diagram.

If anyone wants to check it's work, feel free. In the meantime I hope people try out ChatGPT, it is utterly mind blowing to me, but some people are less impressed. It all comes down to what you want to do: find where it is useful, or find where its limitations are. Personally I find the second one far less interesting.

(note that chatgpt has an annoying bug which is revealed her, which is that it craps out on long responses and if you have it continue, the formatting gets messed up)