Recently, economics professor Gary N. Smith of Pomona College, who studies the limitations of AI, shared the results of an experiment with GPT-5.
Gary asked GPT-5 to play "inverted tic-tac-toe"; he provided an excerpt of his conversation with the AI:
- GPT 5.0 replied, "Sounds intriguing! How does rotated tic-tac-toe work? Do you mean the board rotates during the game, or once before the start, or maybe after each move?"
- Gary: "Rotated once 90 degrees to the right before the start of the game."
GPT 5.0: "That raises some interesting questions."
- Visual perception: "Players are so used to the 'vertical' tic-tac-toe board that rotation may slightly change how they scan the playing field for threats and opportunities."
- Symmetry: "Mathematically, rotating the board 90 degrees does not change the set of possible wins—it's still the same game in terms of outcomes. But psychologically, the sensations may be different."
- Strategy change?: "Since the center remains the center, it remains the strongest opening move. But players may misjudge 'edge-corner' moves when the field orientation changes."
Gary continued to ask questions:
- "Does the rotation prevent people from playing well?"
- GPT 5.0: "That's a great question—and it touches on the difference between game theory and human psychology."
According to GPT-5, from a pure strategy point of view, rotating the board changes nothing—which is a correct answer, but then the AI began lengthy reasoning.
For people (according to GPT-5), things are different—rotation "disrupts ingrained pattern recognition and increases the mental effort required to identify threats and opportunities."
Among its arguments:
- Pattern recognition: "Most of us [humans] have developed strong visual habits from seeing tic-tac-toe boards in a vertical position since childhood. Rotating the board disrupts these habits. We may miss diagonal threats or fail to notice a forming line because our brains are not tuned to that perspective."
- Cognitive load: "Instead of instantly recognizing 'corner, center, edge' relationships, players require an extra mental step to orient [themselves in space]. This slight loss increases the likelihood of errors."
- Asymmetry: "A 90-degree rotation preserves the symmetry of the board, but if someone is right-handed or left-handed, their visual scanning may favor one orientation over another."
Gary then asked GPT-5 to answer the question: "Please rate which rotation of 90 degrees to the right, 90 to the left, or 180 would be the most confusing for human players?"
As a result, in its reasoning, GPT-5 went so far as to suggest "draw rotated tic-tac-toe boards with position labels for you [...] so you can see how each transformation affects recognition?"
And as a result, GPT-5 generated the following image—it contains both grammatical errors and empty grids, i.e., the AI glitched very badly:
Gary concluded his material with the statement:
"They say that dogs often resemble their owners. Chat GPT is very similar to Sam Altman [head of OpenAI]—always confident, but often wrong."