I will be posting something to that effect later this week. (Hopefully).
Basically current gen LLMs apparently do spatial reasoning the way they seemingly do everything else: by reference to previous example. I didn't see them work out which known example to use for a given problem until specifically prompted, in my case by accident.
If you ask an LLM, "what known example did you use to solve this?" it is very likely to cite something plausible-sounding. That absolutely doesn't mean it is what it actually did. It is trying to give the "right answer" and please.
> If you ask an LLM, "what known example did you use to solve this?" it is very likely to cite something plausible-sounding. That absolutely doesn't mean it is what it actually did. It is trying to give the "right answer" and please.
That's not what I said happened though. It didn't solve the problem (for weeks) until I (accidentally) told it which example it happened to know was relevant, and then it solved it in hours.