I didn't make up this methodology and it's genuinely not a trick question (or not intended as such), it's a simple example of an actual class of questions that researchers ask when trying to determine whether a model of the world exists. The paper I linked uses a ball and a plank iirc. Often they use a much wider range of objects eg: something like "Suggest a stable way of stacking a laptop, a book, 4 wine classes, a wine bottle and an orange" is one that I've seen in a paper for example.
ok I believe it may not have been intended as a trick but I think it is. As a human, I'd have assumed you meant the trickier balancing scenario i.e. the plank and barrel on its side.
The question you quoted ("Suggest a stable way of stacking a laptop, a book, 4 wine classes, a wine bottle and an orange") I would consider much fairer and cgpt3.5 gives a perfectly "reasonable" answer:
What's interesting about that one is I think that specific set of objects is part of its training set because when I have played around with swapping out a few of them it sometimes goes really bananas.
