研究：Qwen3.8 27B 用文字做加法

4th October 2026

Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results:

I'm confident GPT-4o didn't cheat and use a calculator, especially since it got so many of the calculations wrong, but I was inspired to run the experiment again on local hardware (a DGX Spark) to explore the effect in a fully controlled environment.

I pasted his image into a Codex Remote session (GPT-6 Astra) and had it run the same experiment using Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf. Here's the result for a run of 30 attempts per combination with reasoning disabled:

Then I ran it again with reasoning enabled. This took a lot longer per pair, so instead of running 30 samples per square I ran just one - which results in a much less visually appealing heatmap since each square is either 100% or 0%:

It got the right answer in 167 out of 169 attempts, and since these were one-shot I'm confident a second run would produce different results here.

Here's a version of the report that includes the reasoning traces from some of those larger calculations, which include text like this:

研究：Qwen3.8 27B 用文字做加法

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