Claude 4 Sonnet gave the (reasonable given the obscurity, but wrong) answer that there was no such easter egg:
>I'm not aware of any MS-DOS productivity program that had Connect Four as a built-in easter egg. While MS-DOS era software was famous for including various easter eggs (like the flight simulator in Excel 97, though that was Windows-era), I can't recall Connect Four specifically being hidden in any major DOS productivity applications.
>The most well-known DOS productivity suites were things like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase, and later Microsoft Office for DOS, but I don't have reliable information about Connect Four being embedded in any of these.
>It's possible this is a case of misremembered details - perhaps your friend is thinking of a different game, a different era of software, or mixing up some details. Or there might be an obscure productivity program I'm not familiar with that did include this easter egg.
>Would you like me to search for more information about DOS-era software easter eggs to see if we can track down what your friend might be thinking of?
That seems like a pretty reasonable response given the details, and included the appropriate caveat that the model was not aware of any such easter egg, and didn't confidently state that there was none.
>It's possible this is a case of misremembered details - perhaps your friend is thinking of a different game, a different era of software, or mixing up some details. Or there might be an obscure productivity program I'm not familiar with that did include this easter egg.
I am not a fan of this kind of communication. It doesn't know so try to deflect the short coming it onto the user.
Im not saying that isn't a valid concern, but it can be used as an easy out of its gaps in knowledge.
> I am not a fan of this kind of communication. It doesn't know so try to deflect the short coming it onto the user.
This is a very human-like response when asked a question that you think you know the answer to, but don't want to accuse the asker of having an incorrect premise. State what you think, then leave the door open to being wrong.
Whether or not you want this kind of communication from a machine, I'm less sure... but really, what's the issue?
The problem of the incorrect premise happens all of the time. Assuming the person asking the question is correct 100% of the time isn't wise.
Because there is no "I don't know" in the training data. Can you imagine a forum where in the response for a question of some obscure easter egg there are hunddeds of "I don't know"?
Gemini 2.5 Flash me a similar answer, although it was a bit more confident in it's incorrect answer:
> You're asking about an MS-DOS productivity program that had ConnectFour built-in.
I need to tell you that no mainstream or well-known MS-DOS productivity program (like a word processor, spreadsheet, database, or integrated suite) ever had the game ConnectFour built directly into it.
>I'm not aware of any MS-DOS productivity program that had Connect Four as a built-in easter egg. While MS-DOS era software was famous for including various easter eggs (like the flight simulator in Excel 97, though that was Windows-era), I can't recall Connect Four specifically being hidden in any major DOS productivity applications.
>The most well-known DOS productivity suites were things like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase, and later Microsoft Office for DOS, but I don't have reliable information about Connect Four being embedded in any of these.
>It's possible this is a case of misremembered details - perhaps your friend is thinking of a different game, a different era of software, or mixing up some details. Or there might be an obscure productivity program I'm not familiar with that did include this easter egg.
>Would you like me to search for more information about DOS-era software easter eggs to see if we can track down what your friend might be thinking of?
That seems like a pretty reasonable response given the details, and included the appropriate caveat that the model was not aware of any such easter egg, and didn't confidently state that there was none.