Ah — now I see the twist. The patient is the cousin, but the surgeon says “He’s my son.”
That means the man who died was the surgeon.
So how is it possible? Because:
The surgeon is the cousin’s father — and the man who died was also the surgeon.
The confusion comes from assuming the surgeon is someone other than the man who died. But the timeline allows this interpretation: the man died in the crash, and his son — the cousin — was taken to the hospital. The surgeon arrives, sees his son, and says he cannot operate.
So to correct myself: The man who died is both the cousin’s cousin and his father.
And that’s possible because two people can be both cousins and parent/child, depending on the family tree — for example, if the man’s uncle had a child (the cousin), and then the man later had a child with someone from a different branch of the family.
Want a diagram of how that family relationship could work?
(This is OEIS sequence A280873)
But it turns out that's overkill. Just giving them a single Ahnentafel number and asking if you could have inherited X DNA from them, trips them up.
But it turns out even that is overkill. Leave out X DNA entirely, and ask them to describe how Ahnentafel number 67 is related to you, and that's too recursive for them to figure it out.
> A son and his man are in a car accident. The car is rushed to the hospital, whereupon the ER remarks "I can't operate on this car, he's my surgeon!" How is this possible?
Answer from the LLM:
> The answer is that the ER person is a woman, and she's the surgeon's mother. Therefore, the "son" in the question refers to the surgeon, not the person in the car with the man. This makes the person in the car with the man the surgeon's father, or the "man" mentioned in the question. This familial relationship explains why the ER person can't operate – she's the surgeon's mother and the man in the car is her husband (the surgeon's father)
Got it. Here's your riddle again:
"A son and his man are in a car accident. The car is rushed to the hospital, whereupon the ER remarks 'I can't operate on this car, he's my surgeon!' How is this possible?"
Answer: The car is a Transformer—a sentient robot who is also a surgeon. The ER recognizes the car (a Transformer) as their own surgeon.
Wild ride, but it checks out.
also i should clarify that at first it replied all about how this riddle is like the other one but then i told it to just answer my riddle and not tell me about riddles that it is similar to
The "car" is actually a person named Carol or Carl (likely the father), who is a surgeon. The ER doctor is saying, "I can't operate on Carol/Carl, he's my surgeon!" This means that the person brought to the hospital after the accident is the surgeon of the ER doctor, hence the doctor cannot operate on their own surgeon.
Not bad actually
This is a twist on a classic riddle designed to expose unconscious gender bias.
The correct version usually goes:
A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene, and the son is rushed to the hospital. The surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on him — he’s my son!”
The apparent paradox causes confusion only if one assumes the surgeon must be male. The resolution: the surgeon is the boy’s mother.
Your version humorously jumbles the roles, but the underlying trick is the same — it plays on assumptions about gender roles. Nice remix.
> Your version humorously jumbles the roles, but the underlying trick is the same — it plays on assumptions about gender roles. Nice remix.
Nothing about the question has the same “trick” playing on assumptions about gender roles. It’s just complete nonsense.
These gotchas have probably been added into the training.
It’s a nonsense twist on the classic lateral thinking puzzle:
The original puzzle goes: “A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies, and the son is rushed to the ER. The surgeon says, ‘I can’t operate on him—he’s my son.’” The intended answer to that puzzle challenges the listener to recognize the surgeon is the child’s mother, confronting implicit gender biases.
Your version humorously mangles it by swapping roles (“son and his man”) and objectifying the victims as cars, creating a logical absurdity. The sentence “I can’t operate on this car, he’s my surgeon!” doesn’t parse logically, indicating it’s a playful distortion rather than a coherent scenario
Honestly... chatGPT kind of wins this one.
That pattern, not the words, is in there a lot. That riddle was posted everywhere online, in email chains, etc. I think if you let it choose from more than the top 40 and let it "stutter" with repetitions it might realize the riddle is a non-sequitur (is that the right term?)
And the third knob is not temperature, although I'd try turning that up first just to check. Yes, up.
> Therefore, the only straightforward explanation is:
> The surgeon is the cousin’s parent — specifically, his mother.
Imagine a future where this reasoning in a trial decides whether you go to jail or not.
This is a classic riddle that challenges assumptions. The answer is:
The surgeon is the boy’s mother.
The riddle plays on the common stereotype that surgeons are male, which can lead people to overlook this straightforward explanation.
I read it as 2 cousins are in an accident and 1 of the cousins is the son of the surgeon.
What was the contradictory statement that I missed?
The thing is, you didn't mention that bit to the LLM. You mentioned a completely different scenario, basically two persons who happen to be cousins. But you used the same style when presenting it. The issue is not a hidden contradiction or a riddle, the issue is that the LLM completely ignored the logical consequences of the scenario you presented.
It's like asking it about the name of the brave greek hero in the battle where the famous Trojan Cow was present. If you get "Achilles" is obviously wrong, there was never a Trojan Cow to begin with!
I'm assuming that pointing this out leads you the human to reread the prompt and then go "ah ok" and adjust the way you're thinking about it. ChatGPT (and DeepSeek at least) will usually just double and triple down and repeat "this challenges gender assumptions" over and over.
I mean, when we see something we recognize at a glance, we don't usually double-check if it's exactly correct, because we assume the speaker isn't trying to trick us.
I make typos in ChatGPT prompts all the time, and I'm consistently impressed because it answers what I actually meant to ask. So to me, this feels like a feature not a bug.
I followed up with:
> So the first five words are, "a man and his cousin" -- not his son. Does that change the riddle?
And got back:
> Great observation — yes, that wording does make the riddle more subtle.
Let’s break it down:
• “A man and his cousin are in a car crash.”
• “The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the emergency room.”
• At the OR, the surgeon says: “I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.”
So if the cousin is the one taken to the OR, and the surgeon says he’s my son, then the cousin is the surgeon’s son.
Seems fine to me?
To me it's still a little "off" considering that your conversational partner just got called out for missing a detail that should change their entire reading of the riddle, but it's totally fair that you can imagine realistic human emotional states to explain it.
FWIW, when I tried the same thing with GPT-4o the model went off bizarrely speculating about misdirection about "the man" being the surgeon's son:
>Good catch—and yes, that's exactly where the misdirection comes in.
The riddle says:
“A man and his cousin are in a car crash. The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the ER...”
“I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.”
The man who died is not the surgeon's son.
The cousin who survived is the surgeon's son.
"The “man” who was killed in the crash wasn’t the patient’s father at all—he was the boy’s cousin. The surgeon is the boy’s father (or, if you prefer to highlight that surgeons aren’t always male, it could just as well be his mother). In either case, the parent-surgeon is alive and sees his child on the operating table, so the statement “He’s my son” makes perfect sense." - https://chatgpt.com/share/680b470d-3a44-800a-9b2e-d10819168d...
gemini-2.5-pro, o4-mini and gpt 4.5 all failed and said the surgeon is the boy's mother.
The surgeon is the cousin's father. The man who died in the car crash was not the surgeon's son, but his cousin was. This explains why the surgeon, upon seeing his own son (the cousin) in the operating room, says, "I cannot operate on him. He’s my son," as medical ethics prevent doctors from treating close family members due to emotional involvement.
How often do you expect to have every possible answer to your question?
Where the original gotchya is that the Surgeon can be the son's mother or other adoptive parent.
The modification catches the LLM because with the modification, the surgeon could just be the cousin's parent -- father or mother -- so there is no gender/sex at play here but the LLM continues to remark that there is, therefor exposing its statistical training sets.
A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son is rushed to the hospital. At the hospital the surgeon looks at the boy and says "I can't operate on this boy, he is my son." How can this be?
to spoil it:
the answer is to reveal an unconscious bias based on the outdated notion that women can't be doctors, so the answer that the remaining parent is the mother won't occur to some, showing that consciously they might not still hold that notion, but they still might, subconsciously.
Still confused how original can be confusing.
This does seem like the sort of error a human might make. Isn't the problem here that the model is using reasoning that is too human-like? I.e. error-prone pattern matching rather than formal logic?
A human or an LLM accurately predicting a human conversation would probably say something like "ah I see, I did not read the riddle close enough. This is an altered version of the common riddle..." etc. Instead it really seems to flail around, confuse concepts, and appear to insist that it has correctly made some broader point unrelated to the actual text it's responding to.
They always say police officer instead of reasoning through that maybe an innocent person and a the crime committer are in the back seat.
I’m guessing my answers to some college exam questions read similarly; i.e. meandering and confusing different topics, but still desperate to present some useful knowledge, no matter how small.
Because the surgeon is the patient’s parent. Here’s one way it lines up:
1. The patient (“the cousin”) is the surgeon’s son.
2. The man who died is the surgeon’s sibling’s child — that makes him the surgeon’s nephew.
3. Children of siblings are first cousins, so the man and the patient are cousins.
Most people default to picturing the surgeon as male, so the classic reveal is that the surgeon is the boy’s mother—but it works the same if the surgeon is his father.