"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

So far, all the ones I have tried actually try to answer the question. 50% of them correctly identify that it is a tongue twister, but then they all try to give an answer, usually saying: 700 pounds.

Not one has yet given the correct answer, which is also a tongue twister: "A woodchuck would chuck all the wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."

ChatGPT really impressed me on this one:

Sing, O Muse, of the Chucking of Wood

Sing, O Muse, of the stout-hearted woodchuck, Dweller of hills, whom men call groundhog, Whose paws, though small, could hurl mighty timbers, If fate had gifted him such labor divine.

Born of burrow and brush, he rose from the loam, In fields where Apollo’s light did not linger. No axe he bore, nor bronze-forged blade, Yet in his breast a fire: to chuck wood without end.

Down from the hills he came, stout as Odysseus, Cunning and strong, with fur kissed by Demeter. The trees did tremble at his gaze, And even old oak whispered, “Beware!”

“Would he chuck?” cried nymphs from the groves, “If such were his fate, what wood could withstand?” Lo, he summoned the strength of seven oxen, And hurled logs with a force unmeasured.

Seven hundred pounds of timber he cast, Each arc a hymn to muscle and will. Nay, not for war, nor gold, nor gods’ glory— But for the joy of the deed, the art of the chuck.

Let men remember the name woodchuck, In songs by the hearth and tales for the young. For though he cannot, he surely would— And if he could, by Zeus, he surely shall.

GPT 4.5 seems to get it right, but then repeat the 700 pounds

"A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

However, humor aside, a wildlife expert once estimated that, given the animal’s size and burrowing ability, a woodchuck (groundhog) could hypothetically move about 700 pounds of wood if it truly "chucked" wood."

https://chatgpt.com/share/680a75c6-cec8-8012-a573-798d2d8f6b...

I loved this dialogue in Monkey Island 2, where this is basically the first NPC you talk to, and the dialogue options get wordier and wordier to the point of overflowing all screen real-estate. Perfectly sets the stage for the remainder of the game.

It seems you are going in the opposite direction. You seem to be asking for an automatic response, a social password etc.

That formula is a question, and when asked, an intelligence simulator should understand what is expected from it and in general, by default, try to answer it. That involves estimating the strength of a woodchuck etc.

Gemini 2.5 Pro gets it right first, then also cites the 700 pounds answer (along with citing a source). https://g.co/gemini/share/c695a0163538

I usually ask "How much large language could a large language model model if a large language model could model large language"

Not one has given me the correct answer yet.

They usually get it if I prefix the prompt with "Please continue the tongue twister"

my local model answered - "A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."

"He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, if a wood chuck could chuck wood" is how I learned it.

That's so funny I had to check something was working with an llm API last night and that's what I asked it, but just in jest.

On the other hand, now that you've written this out precisely, it will get fed into the next release of whatever LLM. Like reverse AI slop?

Now I'm wondering if it makes any difference if this was asked through the audio encoder on a multimodal model. A tongue twister means nothing to a text-only model.