Assessing the Impact of Prompting, Persona, and Chain of Thought Methods on ChatGPT's Arithmetic Capabilities

This study critically evaluates the mathematical proficiency of OpenAI's language model, ChatGPT, by juxtaposing its default computational capabilities against the efficiency of three prescriptive methods: strategic prompting, persona implementation, and the Chain of Thought approach. The evaluation harnessed the diverse and extensive problem sets from the MATH, GSM8K, and MMLU data-sets, which encompassing a broad spectrum of mathematical conundrums and levels of complexity. A sophisticated grading script was designed to determine the efficacy of these interventions in enhancing the model's mathematical precision. Contrary to expectations, our empirical analysis revealed that none of the trialed methods substantially improved ChatGPT's baseline performance. In some cases, these interventions inadvertently disrupted the model's response generation. This investigation concluded that while the pursuit of innovative strategies for augmenting language model performance remains crucial, the specific methods examined within this study did not induce significant improvements in ChatGPT's computational aptitude. These findings underscore the importance of further comprehensive research and exploration of novel techniques to enhance the precision and dependability of such models across diverse domains.