See, that's the thing: It incorrectly guessed the wrong story from Cyberiad with me too! Twice! Then it incorrectly guessed it was in a different real book of fictitious reviews of non-existent stories, Imaginary Magnitude, even though it was a real story! So I asked it to write a fictitious review of the fictitious story it was hallucinating was a real story in a different real book of real stories, and it did.

"The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good" is the story that inspired Will Wright to create SimCity, but it's not the one with the recalcitrant numerically incorrect computer.

https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html

The other commenter amoruso correctly identified it as "Trurl's Machine".

In the transcript I linked to, its first guess was "The First Sally, or Trurl's Electronic Bard" in Cyberiad, which is about a computer that wrote brilliany poetry, not that made mathematical mistakes.

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/WonderfulPoems.h...

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lem/HorriblePoems.ht...

https://gwern.net/doc/ai/poetry/1974-lem-cyberiad-trurlselec...

Human> What is the Stanislaw Lem story about the computer or robot who was absolutely sure that 1+1=3 (or some other mistake) and got violent if contradicted?

ChatGPT> The story you're referring to is "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. Specifically, it's one of the fables from this collection, titled "The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard." In this story, the brilliant constructor Trurl creates an electronic poet, which is essentially a sophisticated computer capable of composing poetry on any subject.

Human> I think you two stories confused.

ChatGPT> You are correct, and I apologize for the confusion. The story you're thinking of is actually "The Dragon of Probability" from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. In this tale, one of the main characters, either Trurl or Klapaucius, constructs a machine that insists two plus two is three. The story humorously explores the themes of artificial intelligence, the stubbornness of machines, and the challenges of dealing with systems that are programmed to be inflexible in their logic. This tale is part of Lem's larger body of work, which often examines the relationship between humans and technology through a satirical lens.

Human> I'm not sure that's the right story either.

ChatGPT> I apologize for the confusion earlier. The story you're referring to might be "The Non-Linear Gulliver," also known as "Non Serviam," a part of "A Perfect Vacuum," a collection of book reviews of non-existent books by Stanislaw Lem. In this particular piece, Lem imagines a review of a fictitious book about "personetics," which is essentially the creation and study of virtual beings with consciousness.

[...]

"The Dragon of Probability" is the third sally in Cyberiad, but not the one I was looking for either.

https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/dec-05-botm-the-cyber...

>The other thing that went through my mind was: what does this book read like in Polish? So much of it in english relied heavily on wordplay -how much of what we are reading is Lem and how much of it is the translator Michael Kandel? In the story the Dragon's of Probability (one of the more entertaining sequences IMO), Klapaucius comes along a group of natives who speak like this:

>>Aye! So he comes to us, yer Grace, partakes of our 'umble fare, polite as you please an' I'll not gainsay it, nay a parfit gentlemean true, pays hondsomely, inquires after the missus don't y'know, aye an' then he sits 'isself down, spreads out a' them contraptions an' thin's with clocks in 'em, y'see, and scribbles furious-like, numbers the are, one after t'other in this wee book he keep in 'is breast pocket, then takes out a -whad'yacallit-therbobbiter thingamabob..."

>How could this dialect ridden material be a direct translation from the Polish??

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28600200

>Marcin Wichary translated one of Lem's stories from Polish to English, and wrote an article about the translation process.

https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-stor...

>Marcin Wichary: This is a backstory of why I translated Stanisław Lem’s short story One hundred and thirty-seven seconds.

>Translations of [Lem’s] works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns. — Wikipedia

https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...

>>One hundred and thirty-seven seconds: A short story by Stanisław Lem published in 1976, translated from Polish in 2015 by Marcin Wichary

>>Translator’s note: This is my first translation of a Stanisław Lem story. I tried to stay true to the spirit of the original as much as possible, which means original occasional odd idioms, mismatched units, and kilometer-long sentences. The story was published in 1976, and predates desktop publishing and the Internet. To the best of my knowledge, Lem has never visited America. If you are interested, read more about why I translated this story and the translation process.

>Marcin actually stalked Stanislaw Lem in person when he was a boy: [... the story and more at the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28600200 and the hn discussion of "The Truth": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28595761 ]

Stanisław Lem on Google’s homepage:

https://mwichary.medium.com/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepa...

I had ChatGPT write some poems in Simlish, then translate them to English:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35543660

It's ironic that it keeps guessing incorrectly about the title of a story about a computer that makes mistakes but refuses to acknowledge them! That's what the rest of my discussion with ChatGPT was about:

https://chat.openai.com/share/9a9e9818-1e23-488e-b517-6d23e3...