Skip to main content
Back to catalog

␣ForCanBeConverted

A C#-compiler-flavored fragment (“can be converted to foreach”) that became the most famous “polysemantic” glitch token: the model perceives it as a different word every time. It exists in cl100k, Llama-3 and Qwen vocabularies because the tokenizers share BPE merges.

Raw token

" ForCanBeConverted"

marks a real space; the symbol itself is not part of the token, and copying preserves it.

Observed behaviors

  • 01ChatGPT/gpt-3.5-turbo interprets it as a different word on every attempt, even re-running the identical prompt — a different message every time at temperature 0.LessWrong
  • 02Verified under-trained in Llama-3-8B/70B, Llama-3.1-8B/70B and multiple Qwen models in the Magikarp repetition-verification reports.GitHub
  • 03ChatGPT sometimes gets stuck in loops or terminates the message at the token (suggesting it is treated as a begin/end-of-sequence marker).LessWrong
Observed or documented on
GPT-3.5 / GPT-4Llama 3Qwen
Behavior types
PolysemanticUnder-trained
Tokenizer
cl100k_base / Llama-3 BPE / Qwen BPE
Discovered by
Matthew Watkins