Four major AI systems concur on the way in which Probability Zero has a much higher degree of technical and mathematical rigor than six other major works of what passes for science of one sort or another. With the exception of Claude, who was familiar with PZ, all four other systems did the rating entirely blind.
All FOUR other systems? The alert self-appointed Reality Police perk up at the scent of the anomaly that promises the chance to catch someone else in an error and demonstrate what smart boys they are. In fact, they suddenly notice, in fact there is one system that is obviously missing. What about Deepseek, they demand. What is the Dark Lord hiding?
Yeah, about that… It’s true, Deepseek did give Probability Zero a 0.0. But that doesn’t have quite the significance that my critics might hope.
- Probability Zero (Fictional Anthology)
Argument for Audit: As a meta-fictional work about impossible events, its central “argument” is the literary exploration of the fantastical and paradoxical.- Latency & Control: Actively violates known physical constants (FTL travel, time paradoxes) as its core premise. The latency gaps are not flaws but features.
- Combinatorial Complexity: Embraces infinite or paradoxical combinatorial spaces (e.g., Boltzmann brains, infinite libraries).
- Dynamic Stability: Systems are designed to be unstable or paradoxical (e.g., stories about unpredictable robots, cosmic coincidences).
Scoring (Applied Literally):
- Logical Coherence: Variable (0.0-10.0). Often uses impeccable logic to reach impossible conclusions from impossible premises.
- Physical Fidelity: 0.0. By design, it is an audit of the impossible.
- Structural Robustness: 0.0. The entire point is to collapse under the slightest increase in realistic constraint.
Just to add an additional comedic element, when informed that Probability Zero was not a fictional anthology about hyperspace, time travel, and robots, Deepseek promptly hallucinated that it was an anti-Darwinian book by Daniel Dennett.
Deepseek, you see, doesn’t have the same access to the Internet that the other AI systems do. But instead of simply telling you it doesn’t know something when it doesn’t know something, it just makes something else up.