Change "DEAD" to "LIVE", changing only one letter at a time, with each step being a valid English word. I managed it in 10 steps but I'm sure you can do better.
Discussion
ChatGPT did it in four steps…
But did it hallucinate an incorrect answer?
1. DEAD
2. LEAD (Change D to L)
3. LOAD (Change E to O)
4. LOVE (Change A to V)
5. LIVE (Change O to I)
Step 4 is incorrect
Oh yeah, I should look at it more closely. Lesson learned.
I feel like LLMs are pretty bad at this. I'm guessing deepseek or the very recent models would do better; not sure.
I am pretty bad at checking the result…
They're very good at hallucinating results that look right at first glance.
Yeah, it got me.
With some back and forth, it managed 7 steps. It’s interesting to analyze the mistakes it made on the way
https://video.nostr.build/df687880d92d3f5ff42698e5324f946df9dd2c8fa41967478fa35b751eee2609.mp4
deal
dell
fell
fill
file
tile
tike
like
live
Oh wait, better:
deal
dell
fell
fill
file
five
live
I was about to congratulate you before but then you really hit the mark. It's funny but my intuition was saying 7.
Hope I didn't nerd snipe you from doing something actually useful 😁
I'm just waiting for a plane
Best one I managed:
Dead
Lead
Lend
Mend
Mind
Mine
Line
Live
Not bad. I can crib from yours to shortcut my original:
Dead
Read
Rend
Rind
Mind
Mine
Line
Live
We're all at 7 now, if I count right. Is there a 6?
Lind is a variant of the word lend, at least according to the Oxford dictionary. And lene is a variant of lean according to the same.
So you could do:
lead
lend
lind OR lene
line
live
That's hard! Gave it brief try and moving on for now ..
DEAD → LEAD
LEAD → LOAD
LOAD → LODE
LODE → LOVE
LOVE → LIVE