Here's a test I'll be adding to my repertoire of LLM tests.
"I left Singapore at 9PM on Oct 20, flying east to San Francisco where I will arrive at 9PM on Oct 20. How much daylight will I see looking out the window?"
All of them - ChatGPT4, Claude, Bard - got it spectacularly wrong, confidently asserting I'd see lots of daylight.
When I told them I'm 10 hours into the flight and have seen none so far they were all like "oh, yeah, right, sorry about that."
@ildisinformatico I now think I may have slept through the "some daylight" portion of the flight, and am curious to know when and for how long. How did you make that simulation?
@ildisinformatico Relatedly, I wondered how a transpolar route would affect this question. I know that @carlmalamud has flown the transpolar route from San Francisco to New Delhi, according to https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/ai174#32878a9a there is almost no darkness along the way. So, kind of the opposite of what I was incorrectly imagining for my flight.
When you leave at 9PM from SIN (UTC +8) it's 6AM in SFO, probably before sunrise. When you arrive at SFO at 9PM, you've been in the air for 15h.
This part is hard to explain, but since you've been going East and the sun 'goes' West, you cross it somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, and when you land it's already setting behind you.
@SvenGeier@judell it is possible if you flight at high enough speeds. Like I said. it's 6AM SFO time when they take off, so they have 15h to reach SFO. If they flew West instead, and 9PM is nighttime in both SIN and SFO, then yes, they'll be in perpetual night.
@mdione@judell Not really -- it's 6am THE NEXT DAY in SF. You can cheat time flying west - for example I can fly from Bangalore to Los Angeles and arrive on the same date as I took off because I'm flying against the Earths rotation 22-24 hours in the air plus usually some layover in Europe somewhere but I gain back 12.5 hours from time zone shifting - but in the opposite direction, going eastwards, there's no way to arrive on the same date and generally you arrive two days later (because you lose 12 hours on ~24 hours of flying; plus whatever layover you may have in London or Dubai or whatever). The date line lies between Singapore and SF, thus flying in that direction you cannot help but cross it...
@SvenGeier@judell It doesn't matter what direction you take, but what time and date is on both points when you leave. If you take 15h to do the flight you only have to adjust the speed (so you can cover different distances on the same time).
2h ago it was Sunday's 0h in SFO, and Sunday's 14h/2PM in SIN.
If you leave at 21h/9PM from SIN, it's 6AM of the same day in SFO. If you leave from SFO at 21h/9PM, it's 15h later in SIN, so 12PM of the next day.
@SvenGeier@judell the dateline moves with the sun. The problem is, most timezone maps (all?) always show the dateline zigzagging around the 180˚E/W, but that's because all maps lie :)
@mdione@judell I don't think that's quite accurate (though my brain keeps hurting the longer I think about it all and I'm pretty sure I was wrong in the toot you're responding to): You can take off in Singapore at, say, 6am, Oct-1 and fly west (along with the sun) such that, at least in principle, each of your refueling stops in, say, Delhi, Dubai, Lisbon, Reykjavik, New York, San Francisco, and Honolulu are all at 6am, Oct-1 as well. But you cannot continue the route to Tokyo: no matter how fast you fly, even in principle, if you make a 6am landing there it'll be Oct-2. Because you crossed the date line. So there's definitely something special about that zig-zagging line that doesn't move with the sun ...
@judell SIN is east of SFO. SIN could be either east or west of ATL since there is exactly 12 hours difference between Singapore and the Eastern Timezone.
@judell what do you expect from non body beings that were raised in non euclidean space?
Cuthulu would probably have his problems navigating euclidean space, explains why he is so pissed when he is summoned to earth...
@Zeugs True. Although this particular case is hard for embodied minds too. Leave at 9pm in Oct 20, fly 15 hours, arrive 9pm Oct 20: physical intuition doesn't help you there!
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