"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" – A 40-year book-quest

What a wonderful story. I've also had an experience of someone in a writing community being able to name a story I read in my youth, it is really a unique feeling to have a distant hazy memory made real due to the wisdom of another. It's a similar feeling to finding the perfect word for an uncertain feeling you've never been able to give voice to.

I forgot the title of a Polish book I once read, but I remember many plot points. When I described them to gpt 4o, in five responses it gave me six books, three of which were English and one was Russian, but attributed all six of them to random Polish fantasy writers (even Polish ones had the wrong authors).

Sidenote: David Allen Green, the author of this blog, is a brilliant writer on constitutional law in the UK. It is quite a subject since Britain doesn't have a written constitution. He was a wonderful guide through the Brexit chicanery.

It's interesting that the author is so disparaging of ChatGPT, when he himself had misremembered the title of the story as containing 'Michaelmas' and the importance of the goblins. What are these but hallucinations?

Obviously, it's no good that tools are offering useless results and making searches harder. There's also how you use the tools - asking GPT to one-shot find something that may not have been in the training data is a risk of hallucination that's easy to be aware about, while using AI to assist a web and archive search might have produced the same end result as what happened, a smart librarian kindly doing some searching.

Probably more fundamental breakthroughs are needed in how AIs 'know' stuff. But the gap between how humans and machines produce obscure half-remembered knowledge doesn't seem that big.

I've got one of these too. When I was 6 or 7 I read a book in the school library in which the villains were "bone people" and the heroes were space explorers. The bone people could read minds, so they could tell everything the heroes were planning and thwart them.

Eventually the heroes learn to keep their true thoughts in the back of their minds, where the bone people can't access them, and with this technique they defeat the bone people. It was the best book I'd ever read (up till then!) and I remember practicing keeping my thoughts in the back of my mind.

I've been trying for years to find this book again. Anybody have ideas?

Edit: it occurred to me that I should try an LLM, so I pasted the above text into O1 and, in a combination of anticlimactic and thrilling, it gave the answer straightaway. The book is https://www.amazon.com/Bone-People-Space-Science-Fiction/dp/... and the title is, er, "Bone People". Thanks ChatGPT!

Edit 2: having now read the OP (and it's great), I see that the ChatGPT angle was already in there. But it produced an opposite result in my case.

I am glad the book was found in the end, I had a similar case that took me years to track down. My great grandmother used to always send on christmas a Penguin Classic childrens book and 100 brand new pennies in a handcherchief - for years I tried to track down one of the books describing wolves crowding round a dying explorers fire - which turned out to be White Fang by Jack London.

It's funny. As soon as he described his problem, I suspected ChatGPT would enter the picture. It's often significantly better than search engines for finding the name of even an obscure work from a description, so of course folks on book-finding subreddits would use it a lot.

But the author's absolutely right to warn that it also regularly fails us, and the author's also right the celebrate the folks who are trained specifically in finding this sort of information in ways that the automated tools can't replicate yet.

Reminds me of an old radio broadcast or some kind of audio recording that I've been trying to find for ~25 years. My mom had listened to it when she was younger, and had somehow managed to get it onto cassette tape for us to listen to when we were kids. It was some kind of Christmas story we'd listen to while decorating cookies, a kind of crazy tale that you never heard anywhere else, involving the towns of "Twinkle Twankle" and "Twonkle Twonkle" and other crazy wordplay like that. Unfortunately, that's the only unique bit that I remember, save for recalling a melody or two here and there and the timbre of the narrator's voice, neither of which help in tracking it down.

I'd love the satisfaction of tracking it down some day just like this person did.

For anyone who has a similar quest (trying to find semi-remembered media from one’s youth, based on vague details), r/tipofmytongue on Reddit is a great resource. People there often succeed where AIs fail.

I have one of these "40 year quests" too, but it's a cartoon.

Maybe you clever folk will be more ingenious than I've been.

The story goes like this:

An old king's life is upended one day when a beautiful, mysterious woman appears and says she'll grant youth and her hand in marriage to the man that completes some challenges. The only challenge I remember was that she sets up 3 cauldrons: One had boiling oil. One had milk. The last had ice-cold water.

The king wants to see it work first so he points to a random little boy and orders him to jump into the cauldrons or he'd be put to death.

The boy leaps into each cauldron and there's a terrible delay on the last one. The cold water cauldron even freezes over.

The boy breaks out of the last cauldron and has been transformed into a strapping young man.

The king, seeing proof that it works, decides to jump into the cauldrons. However, when he hops out, he's still an old man.

The woman announces that the magic only works once, and she and the stable boy walk away together, arm-in-arm.

...

I've searched for it online a fair bit but I've never found it.

Some details from my memory:

  * The cartoon was very short (less than 30 minutes. probably closer to 10 or 15) 
  * It had no dialog, only sound effects and music.
  * A woman's voice narrated it. I can still hear her.
  * Now that I'm grown, I see it having a Slavic or Russian aesthetic.
  * The woman had black hair and a long white dress.
  * The king was very short with a big white beard.
  * The boy, when he turns into a man, has pointy boots and shoulder pads. :)
  * Probably made between 1975 and 1985
  * Part of an anthology (many cartoons on one VHS tape... ours had been run so much that it started to skew and stretch the image)

In my mind, it's aesthetically very similar to an heirloom that my grandmother made and I assume that's why I've always wanted to find it.

ChatGPT and the intertubes in general haven't been very useful.

I'll add my experience to the mix. I was in Thailand in the early 2000s and we were eating at a night market and I heard a song that sounded like something by the Beatles or another 60s band. I started looking for what it might have been when I got back to the states a year later; did it say doctor Jones? Friends and google were no help. Anyway, 20 years later I asked ChatGPT and it come back with "New York Mining Disaster 1941" by the Bee Gees... Simply incredible. I suppose there will be fewer of these decade long searches now!

Another great example how hallucination is the Achilles heel of AI. Never implicitly trust its output.

I also had a science fiction book from my childhood that I kept trying to find. Eventually I did find the title and author through a chat with ChatGPT, unlike in this case. (It was Midworld by Alan Dean Foster, if anyone is curious. I'm not sure why that particular book stuck in my head.)

Lovely and well told story though I'm not sure what the following excerpt has to do with anything:

> The second is that nowadays the real problem perhaps is not with Christmas decorations staying up too late, but with them going up too early, and with shops selling Christmas wares and playing Christmas music well before Advent, let alone Christmas

Somewhat hilariously, I just asked chatgpt 4o with web access, and it found this blog post, and then authoritatively repeated verbatim the same wrong answer he was given from ChatGPT on reddit.

https://chatgpt.com/share/678061d1-7920-8000-9b72-0b2d7ea60e...

I gave up trying to get it to fix its answer.

"You will even notice how it neatly covers everything I could remember – giving equal weight to each data point and deftly joining them all together.

And again, what ChatGPT here had to offer was utterly – absolutely – false.

Like a fluent and practised (but unwise) liar it had contrived an account that fitted only the available information."

A fundamental flaw in modern "AI" is that it has no model of reality against which it is checking its (or anyone else's) words. It isn't even lying; it has no concept of the difference between truth and lies, therefore it cannot be made to stop lying, because it isn't even lying, it's just spewing language that sounds good.

This makes it a passable tool for sales, but an extremely poor tool for anything which requires accuracy of any kind. It's not that it is trying to be accurate and failing (in which case further work on it might be expected to improve it); it is not attempting to be accurate; indeed the concept of accuracy is not anywhere in its architecture. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, yes; accuracy or truth, no. It will not get better at being truthful as it is worked on, it will only get better at being persuasive.

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