A GPS is one that "leads you down the garden path". As you read it you think you are understanding it, then it socks you on the back of the head ("This makes no sense") but finally you realise you'd been reading it the wrong way and it makes sense after all. The canonical example is
"The old man the boat."
Another one, that is really hard to parse, is
"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
Eh?#%~
The Wikipedia article says the first example "has been used to test the capabilities of artificial intelligence efforts" but that was in 2016, and today DeepSeek has no trouble, it's seen it before and can analyse it with no difficulty at all
I thought I would try making up my own GPS
Here's my attempt at a GPS sentence. It took me several goes before I was able to work the idea up into something that met DeepSeek's quite stringent criteria for a bona fide example but I finally came up with this which earned its seal of approval.
Garden-Path Sentences
Annie L. Pressland (1862-1933), from Wikimedia
A GPS is one that "leads you down the garden path". As you read it you think you are understanding it, then it socks you on the back of the head ("This makes no sense") but finally you realise you'd been reading it the wrong way and it makes sense after all. The canonical example is
"The old man the boat."
Another one, that is really hard to parse, is
"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
Eh?#%~
The Wikipedia article says the first example "has been used to test the capabilities of artificial intelligence efforts" but that was in 2016, and today DeepSeek has no trouble, it's seen it before and can analyse it with no difficulty at all
I thought I would try making up my own GPS
Here's my attempt at a GPS sentence. It took me several goes before I was able to work the idea up into something that met DeepSeek's quite stringent criteria for a bona fide example but I finally came up with this which earned its seal of approval.
"The hack saw the editor."