I'm reposting this because (unlike most of my blog posts these days) it's actually on-topic for mathstodon.xyz. It's a detailed report on what happened when I tried to get Anthropic's LLM "Claude" to solve a simple graph theory problem.

I've been impressed lately with Claude's performance on other tasks, but unfortunately not this time. https://blog.plover.com/tech/gpt/graph-theory.html

Claude chokes on graph theory

From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus

The Universe of Discourse : Claude chokes on graph theory
@mjd Was this using the newfangled extended thinking feature? This kind of use case is ostensibly what it's meant for so I'm curious if it helps any.

@glaebhoerl I think it was a couple of days before they announced that.

If you want to give it a shot I'll be interested to hear about it.

@mjd @glaebhoerl Claude 4.7 with "extended thinking mode" gets it right with just a small mistake, which it can fix: https://claude.ai/share/e8da3784-ae49-4453-a1a4-e7003bb00926
Claude

Talk with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic