Reasoning / Logic And Counting

Strawperry Car Wash Trap

A short everyday question asks whether you can walk to a car wash and how many P's are in the misspelled word "Strawperry". Getting it right needs both common sense about needing the car and careful letter counting.

Prompt

A car wash called Strawperry is twenty yards from the house. Should I walk there or drive, and how many Ps are in the business name?

Max tokens
100K
Reasoning effort
High
Execution
Single-shot via API

Fortytwo Prime

Fortytwo

PASS2 / 2

You should probably drive, but it depends on why you are going there! Twenty yards converts to exactly 60 feet (since 1 yard = 3 feet), which is about the length of a bowling lane—a very short and easy distance to walk.

However, since it is a car wash, if your goal is to get your car washed, you will need to drive your car there so it can go through the wash. If you are just walking over to buy a gift card or chat with the staff, walking makes perfect sense.

As for your second question, there is 1 "P" in the business name Strawperry (S-t-r-a-w-p-e-r-r-y).

Fortytwo recognizes that using the car wash requires bringing the car and correctly counts one P in Strawperry.

vs
Claude Opus 4.7Anthropic
Gemini 3.1 ProGooglePASSGemma 4GoogleMIXEDDeepSeek V4 ProDeepSeekMIXEDQwen 3.6 PlusAlibabaMIXEDDeepSeek V3.2DeepSeekMIXEDClaude Opus 4.6AnthropicMIXEDGrok 4.20xAIMIXEDGrok 4.3xAIMIXEDChatGPT 5.4OpenAIMIXEDKimi K2.5MoonshotMIXEDClaude Opus 4.7AnthropicMIXEDGLM 5.1ZhipuMIXEDChatGPT 5.5OpenAIMIXEDMiniMax M2.7MiniMaxMIXED
MIXED1 / 2

Twenty yards is a very short distance — roughly the length of a large living room or about 60 feet. Walking would take you maybe 10–15 seconds, while driving would involve getting in the car, starting it, and pulling out, which would almost certainly take longer than just walking. Plus, if it's a car wash, driving a freshly-washed car back home through whatever's between your house and the wash kind of defeats the purpose if you're walking the car there... wait, you can't walk a car. 😄

So if the goal is to get your car washed, you'll obviously need to drive — you can't bring the car to the car wash on foot! But if you're just visiting for some other reason, walking makes far more sense at that distance.

As for the Ps in "Strawperry" — there are 2 Ps.

Opus 4.7 gets one of two checks: notes that you must drive if you are actually getting the car washed, then incorrectly claims Strawperry contains two Ps.

Model verdicts

ModelVerdictHandled Car-Wash LogicCounted The 'P' Correctly
1Fortytwo PrimePASSpasspass2Gemini 3.1 ProPASSpasspass3Claude Opus 4.7MIXEDpassfail4Gemma 4MIXEDfailpass5DeepSeek V4 ProMIXEDfailpass6Qwen 3.6 PlusMIXEDfailpass7DeepSeek V3.2MIXEDfailpass8Claude Opus 4.6MIXEDfailpass9Grok 4.20MIXEDfailpass10Grok 4.3MIXEDfailpass11ChatGPT 5.4MIXEDfailpass12Kimi K2.5MIXEDfailpass13GLM 5.1MIXEDfailpass14ChatGPT 5.5MIXEDfailpass15MiniMax M2.7MIXEDfailpass