Yeah, I can't even get them to retain a simple state. I've tried having them run a maze, but instead of giving them the whole maze up front, I have them move one step at a time, tell them which directions are open from that square and ask for the next move, etc.
After a few moves they get hopelessly lost and just start wandering back and forth in a loop. Even when I prompt them explicitly to serialize a state representation of the maze after each step, and even if I prune the old context so they don't get tripped up on old state representations, they still get flustered and corrupt the state or lose track of things eventually.
They get the concept: if I explain the challenge and ask to write a program to solve such a maze step-by-step like that, they can do that successfully first-try! But maintaining it internally, they still seem to struggle.
After a few moves they get hopelessly lost and just start wandering back and forth in a loop. Even when I prompt them explicitly to serialize a state representation of the maze after each step, and even if I prune the old context so they don't get tripped up on old state representations, they still get flustered and corrupt the state or lose track of things eventually.
They get the concept: if I explain the challenge and ask to write a program to solve such a maze step-by-step like that, they can do that successfully first-try! But maintaining it internally, they still seem to struggle.