How many rs in strawberrry

I don’t know what to say. All Gemini 2.0 models answer “3” for this question:

How many "r"s are in “strawberry”?

S T R(1) A W B E R(2) R(3) R(4) Y

Can the Gemini dev team do me a favorite?
Combine the reasoning of DeepSeek R1 + the massive token count of Gemini 2.0 in Gemini 3.0. You can’t imagine how powerful that combination will be.

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Holy cow, I just tried this and NONE of the latest models got it right.

Prompt: How many "r"s are in “strawberrry”?
Expected answer => 4

Result:
gemini-2.0-flash => There are three "r"s in “strawberrry”.

gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05 => There are three "r"s in “strawberrry”.

gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 => There are three "r"s in the word “strawberry”.

gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21 =>
Thought process:

  1. Understand the question: The question asks to count the occurrences of the letter “r” in the word “strawberrry”.
  2. Identify the word: The word is “strawberrry”.
  3. Scan the word: Go through the word letter by letter and look for the letter “r”.
  • s
  • t
  • r (count 1)
  • a
  • w
  • b
  • e
  • r (count 2)
  • r (count 3)
  • y
  1. Count the "r"s: As we scanned, we counted three "r"s.
  2. State the answer: There are three "r"s in “strawberrry”.

Answer:
Let’s count them out loud:
s - t - r - a - w - b - e - r - r - y

There are three "r"s in “strawberrry”.

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Bonus:
ChatGPT 4o-mini:
The word “strawberrry” has three "r"s.

ChatGPT 4o:
The word “strawberrry” has three "r"s.

ChatGPT o3-mini:
Reasoning:
Reasoned about letter count in “strawberry” for a few seconds

Let’s break down the word “strawberrry”:

  • Letters: s, t, r, a, w, b, e, r, r, r, y
  • The letter “r” appears as the 3rd, 8th, 9th, and 10th characters.

Thus, there are 4 "r"s in “strawberrry”.

Answer:
Let’s break down the word “strawberrry”:

  • Letters: s, t, r, a, w, b, e, r, r, r, y
  • The letter “r” appears as the 3rd, 8th, 9th, and 10th characters.

Thus, there are 4 "r"s in “strawberrry”.

DeepSeek V3:
The server is busy. Please try again later.

Both the non-reasoning model outputs: :clown_face:

However, reasoning models answer correctly in the first go.

overfitting?

temp) How many "r"s are in “strawberrry”?
There are three "r"s in “strawberry”.

temp) How many "r"s are in “strawberry”?
There are three "r"s in the word “strawberry”.

temp) How many "r"s are in “strawberrrry”?
There are five "r"s in “strawberrrry”.

temp) How many "r"s are in “strawbery”?
There are two "r"s in “strawbery”.

enable code execution while asking the question and it should give a right answer every time!

That’s called cheating because it passes a string to the counting function and the answer is based on the return.

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