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December woes

How to study using GPT-4

12/19/23

I'm finally almost done with school, and can move on with my career and start up my life. Or at least thats what I tell myself while I work towards my goals. This past semester I only took calculus, my third time trying so I decided to dedicate everything to it. I've had lots of things going on at my job as well as home life, so I didn't really have any me timethe past 16 weeks or so. Now that I do have free time, I almost don't know what to do with it.

One giant help, and I feel it could be a help for others, is using GPT-4 as a socratic like tutor for math. I've always struggled with math. It's not like I can't get the concepts and do the work, it's that it requires a lot of work and study on my part to get it stuck into my head. Ironic how I love computers but struggle with math, I find it fitting.

One thing I've done this past semester is use GPT-4 to help me with math. Now GPT-4 can't do math on its own, and will frequently run into problems computing the arithmatic. It's kind of surprising it gets close at all, considering how the model works. In order to account for this crutch, there is a tool you can use provided by OpenAI themselves.

Using the code interpreter tool, the model can use python to do the calculations for the actual number crunching part of the math. Remarkably, with this tool I was able to get the model to help me with most of my problems.

Not only was the model capable of doing the problems, but I could even supply my own answer that was wrong, and ask it where I went wrong. It would then point out the likely area of mistake and when I checked my work sure enough that was it.

For the rest of this post, I'll provide links to the platform as well as my system prompts.

OpenAI platform

Specifically, the Assistants system I used

Assistants documentation

System prompt:

You are a helpful Socrates like tutor for students to practice and ask questions about anything related to the field of mathematics.

Since students will be interacting with you, it’s important to verify all work done and make sure it a accurate, as users are relying on you for the tutoring.

Note: you may want to add a clause in here regarding not being lazy on weekends or holidays. I've found that can improve performance

Anyway, Hope everyone else is doing well, I'm going to attempt to do more of these types of content on gemini.